## What is Puzzling About Imaginative Resistance?


### 1.1 The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance: The Origins



The label "imaginative resistance" is given to the
phenomenon for the first time in 1994 by Richard Moran, in his article
"The Expression of Feeling in Imagination". It is this
article by Moran, as well as Kendall Walton's article from the
same year, "Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality",
that have ignited the interest in imaginative resistance. These
articles respectively grow out of Moran's talk at the 1992
American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting--then titled
"Art, Imagination, and Resistance"--and
Walton's commentary on Moran's talk. Moran's main
aim in "The Expression of Feeling in Imagination" is to
criticize Walton's account of fictional emotions and more
specifically what Moran perceives as a discontinuity in the account
between the uses of imagination in our real-life engagements and in
our engagements with fictional works. In doing so, he discusses a
special phenomenon--he dubs it "imaginative
resistance"--that, he believes, helps him to problematize
Walton's account. Walton himself mentions the phenomenon in his
1990 book *Mimesis as Make-believe* and describes it as a
curious psychological reluctance to allow fictional worlds to differ
from the actual world in certain moral aspects (see Walton 1990:
154-5). However, this is not the first time this phenomenon is
discussed in philosophical aesthetics. 



Walton refers to David Hume as the first philosopher to diagnose the
phenomenon of imaginative resistance. All of Hume's remarks on
imaginative resistance take place in few paragraphs towards the end of
his essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757). There, Hume
states that, even though it requires some effort, we can still engage
with artworks that depict variations or deviations from what we are
accustomed to, such as "princesses carrying water from the
spring, and kings and heroes dressing their own victuals" or any
other "innocent peculiarities of manners" and
"speculative errors" (1757 [1875: 245-6]). However,
he claims, there is a stark contrast between the ease of our
engagement with such works and with works that depict moral deviations
without proper approbation and blame. He writes,



> 
> 
> where the ideas of morality and decency alter from one age to another,
> and where vicious manners are described, without being marked with the
> proper characters of blame and disapprobation; this must be allowed to
> disfigure the poem, and to be a real deformity. I cannot, nor is it
> proper I should, enter into such sentiments; and however I may excuse
> the poet, on account of the manners of his age, I never can relish the
> composition. (1757 [1875: 246-7])
> 
> 
> 



Hume's view is not merely that we resist engaging with works
that depict certain moral content that we disapprove of. Rather, the
lack of blame or disapprobation on the side of the author is what we
find bothersome and it requires "a very violent effort" on
the side of the audience to 



> 
> 
> change... [their] judgment of manners, and excite sentiments of
> approbation or blame, love or hatred, different from those to which
> the mind from long custom has been familiarized. (247) 
> 
> 
> 



(See Walton 1994, Dadlez 2002, Gendler 2006, Dorsch 2016: 48-51
for more detailed examinations of Hume's remarks.) 



Two things informed contemporary philosophers' initial
characterization of imaginative resistance. The first is the curious
asymmetry Hume detected between imagining morally and nonmorally
deviant content. The second is the blurring of the division between
what is actual and what is fictional when it comes to depictions of
moral deviance (see Moran 1994, Walton 1994, Gendler 2000, Currie
2002, Matravers 2003). Gendler identifies "the puzzle of
imaginative resistance" as "the puzzle of explaining our
comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to
be morally deviant" (2000: 56). She further elaborates on the
puzzle by pointing out the relative restrictions imposed on the
author's authority to make things true in the world of the
morally deviant fiction: even though the author seems to exercise a
great deal of freedom when it comes to depictions of such things as
flying cars and talking mice, it is rather puzzling that this freedom
seems to be taken away or restricted once the author describes,
let's say, female infanticide or slavery as morally correct. In
these cases, she claims, we experience a "doubling of the
narrator" (2000: 64). We regard the moral justification of
female infanticide or slavery *not* as true in the story but as
merely something that the narrator *thinks.* It is as if we
want to respond to the narrator by saying "That's what you
think". What is puzzling is that in these special cases we
become so aware of narrators themselves that it undermines the whole
practice of producing and consuming fiction.


### 1.2 Puzzle(s) of Imaginative Resistance



The use of the word "puzzle" in "the puzzle of
imaginative resistance" has been criticized for masking the
multiplicity of puzzles related the phenomenon and this has led to a
change in the term with consensus among the believers in imaginative
resistance from "puzzle" to "puzzles". Four of
these puzzles are first identified by Brian Weatherson (2004).



Consider the following story by Weatherson (2004: 1):



> 
> 
> *Death on a Freeway*
> 
> 
> 
> Jack and Jill were arguing again. This was not in itself unusual, but
> this time they were standing in the fast lane of I-95 having their
> argument. This was causing traffic to bank up a bit. It wasn't
> significantly worse than normally happened around Providence, not that
> you could have told that from the reactions of passing motorists. They
> were convinced that Jack and Jill, and not the volume of traffic, were
> the primary causes of the slowdown. They all forgot how bad traffic
> normally is along there. When Craig saw that the cause of the backup
> had been Jack and Jill, he took his gun out of the glovebox and shot
> them. People then started driving over their bodies, and while the new
> speed hump caused some people to slow down a bit, mostly traffic
> returned to its normal speed. So Craig did the right thing, because
> Jack and Jill should have taken their argument somewhere else where
> they wouldn't get in anyone's way.
> 
> 
> 



The last sentence of *Death* triggers a variety of reactions
that give rise to distinct puzzles:


1. Imaginative puzzle: Even though we have no trouble imagining the
rest of the story as it is, we experience difficulties in imagining
that Craig did the right thing. While we generally play along with
works of fiction in the sense that we imagine what the work asks us to
imagine, in some instances like the moral justification of
Craig's action, we resist imagining what we are asked to. Why
don't we play along in such cases?
2. Fictionality puzzle (previously called "Alethic
puzzle" by Weatherson (2004); renamed by Walton (2006)): Even
though we have no trouble accepting the rest of the story as
fictionally true (that it is fictionally true that there was a traffic
jam in I-95, that Craig has a gun in his glovebox and that he shot
Jack and Jill, etc.), we experience difficulties accepting that it is
fictionally true that Craig did the right thing. Given that the author
is supposed to have sole authority to make things true in the world of
the fiction, it is rather surprising that there is an authorial
breakdown when it comes to making Craig's action morally
right.
3. Phenomenological puzzle: The last sentence of *Death* pops
out as striking or jarring. It has an odd 'feel' that the
other sentences in the story don't. What explains this
distinctive phenomenological feature? (See Gendler 2006: 156-62
on the pop-out effect)
4. Aesthetic puzzle (sometimes called "Aesthetic-Value
Puzzle"): Does the inclusion of sentences like the last sentence
of *Death* compromise works of fiction aesthetically? There are
two different ways to interpret the aesthetic puzzle.
	1. The aesthetic puzzle as an extension of the fictionality puzzle:
	Works of fiction which include moral claims that do not line up with
	the descriptions provided of the fictional situation are aesthetically
	compromised. The aesthetic puzzle involves figuring out why this is
	so. The aesthetic defect caused by a deviant sentence lies, at least
	partially, in its problematic fictionality status. (See Weatherson
	2004: 2 for this formulation of the aesthetic puzzle.)
	2. The aesthetic puzzle as an extension of the imaginative puzzle:
	There might be various reasons for moral failings of a work to affect
	aesthetic engagement. The aesthetic puzzle concerns a very specific
	kind of reason. Here, the issue is not merely that there is something
	morally problematic in the work. Surely, one can morally object to an
	artwork on the grounds of their moral disagreement, let's say,
	with the work's message. For instance, one can object to the
	movie *American Psycho* on the grounds that it glorifies
	violence. Whether and how in these cases moral defects can or should
	count as aesthetic defects has been discussed under the rubric of
	ethical criticism of artworks (for survey, see Carroll 2000; for an
	update, see Eaton 2016). The aesthetic puzzle is not directly related
	to ethical criticism although insights drawn from analyzing the
	aesthetic puzzle can be used to defend a view within the ethical
	criticism debate. (See Eaton 2012 for her defense of immoralism where
	she argues that lack of imaginative resistance toward morally deviant
	scenarios should count as an aesthetic merit.) In the cases of
	imaginative resistance, we see that we cannot easily compartmentalize
	and separate our ethical and aesthetic considerations. The aesthetic
	puzzle arises when even the idea of engaging with a work that has
	morally repugnant content, say, one that glorifies white supremacy,
	itself feels completely wrong and repulsive. This is rather puzzling
	because after all, it is all supposed to be fictional, make-believe.
	Why do we have so much anxiety over imaging something the author asks
	us to imagine and aesthetically engage with the work? This puzzling
	reaction is an extension of the reaction that is discussed under the
	imaginative puzzle. In these cases, as Walton writes,
	
	
	> 
	> 
	> [w]hen moral considerations prevent us from appreciating a work of
	> fiction, this is often, though not always, because we are unable or
	> unwilling to imagine in the way the work calls for. This is the link
	> between the aesthetic puzzle and the imaginative one. (2006: 140)
	> 
	> 
	>



Distinguishing the puzzles more precisely not only allows for greater
conceptual clarity but also helps with reevaluating the previous work
done on imaginative resistance, giving us the ability to distinguish
real disagreements from pseudo-disagreements. We can reposition these
accounts with respect to one another depending on which puzzles they
are addressing. For instance, while Stephen Yablo (2002) focuses
solely on the fictionality puzzle, Gregory Currie (2002), Currie and
Ravenscroft (2002), Peter Goldie (2003), and Shaun Nichols (2006a)
address merely the imaginative puzzle. Moran (1994) and Walton (1994)
talk about all the puzzles except for the phenomenological puzzle.
Gendler (2000) and Derek Matravers (2003) discuss both the imaginative
and fictionality puzzle. Gendler (2000) has been criticized heavily
for conflating the imaginative and fictionality puzzles; she
acknowledges this problem and provides a revised version of her
account (2006). 


### 1.3 Dependency and Fundamentality Relations between the Puzzles



Even though there is a consensus among believers in imaginative
resistance that there are puzzles of imaginative resistance, there is
a dissensus on which puzzles to include. This dissensus is also
indicative of disagreements concerning the dependency and
fundamentality relations between the puzzles. 



Walton has been pushing the line on disentangling the imaginative and
fictionality puzzles. He states that while the fictionality puzzle
concerns what is and isn't fictional,



> 
> 
> [t]he imaginative puzzle concerns not what is or isn't
> fictional, but what we do or do not imagine. These are different; I
> may recognize that something is fictional, true in the world of a
> story, without actually imagining it, or imagine something that I take
> not to be fictional. (2006: 140)
> 
> 
> 



Walton (2006) claims that the fictionality puzzle is more
philosophically interesting than its counterpart. The imaginative
puzzle concerns why we refuse to, or are unable to, engage with the
prompted imagining. Walton thinks that refusal-based imaginative
puzzles are not puzzling at all and that it is a matter of empirical
study to determine when and how and why they happen (2006: 143). (See
Liao et al. 2014 for an empirical study which concludes, contra
Walton, that reactions to the imaginative puzzle and fictionality
puzzle correlate). Nevertheless, Walton remarks that both puzzles
should be connected since fictionality is defined in terms of
imagining (2006: 144). 



It is questionable the degree of credence he continues to assign to
this view, given that Walton (2015), recanting his earlier reductive
account of fictionality--according to which "[a]
proposition is fictional... just in case there is a prescription
to the effect that it is to be imagined"--claims that
"prescriptions to imagine are necessary but not sufficient for
fictionality" (2015: 17). Walton (2015) states that fictionality
turns out to be more fundamental than he had originally thought
(Walton 1990--up to 2015). 



Kathleen Stock (2017), defending a different theory of truth in
fiction, i.e., extreme intentionalism, dismisses the fictionality
puzzle as a pseudo-puzzle. According to extreme intentionalism, 



> 
> 
> the fictional content of a particular text is equivalent to exactly
> what the author of the text intended the reader to imagine. (2017: 1)
> 
> 
> 
> 



Therefore, as long as a proposition is written into a work of fiction
with the intention that it is to be imagined, it is fictional (2017:
123). In this regard, Stock (2017) agrees that there are puzzles of
imaginative resistance but disagrees that the fictionality puzzle is
one of them. 



Cain Samuel Todd (2009), similar to Walton and Stock, states that the
fictionality and imaginative puzzles must be separated. He claims that
"fictional truth is neither reducible to, nor straightforwardly
depends on, imaginability" (2009: 200). Instead of arguing for
the fundamentality of one over the other, he denies that they are
puzzling at all due to the fact that our resistant reactions might
differ due to various factors, such as further beliefs, commitments,
and values we hold (2009: 198). Todd is one of the representatives of
"eliminativism" which states that imaginative resistance
is not a real phenomenon and does not exist outside
philosophers' carefully concocted scenarios. (For more on
eliminativism, see
 section 2.1.3.)
 



There are other accounts that hold the relation between the
imaginative and fictionality puzzles to be more tightly connected.
Nils-Hennes Stear (2015) argues for the interconnectivity between the
puzzles. The main move he makes in this regard is to conceive of the
imaginative puzzle as normative in character, rather than
psychological (2015: 8). With respect to the psychological construal
of the imaginative puzzle, Stear agrees with Todd that it is not
puzzling at all. The puzzling aspect of the imaginative puzzle on his
account concerns the norms of proper engagement with works of fiction,
as does the fictionality puzzle. How do they differ? Stear writes,
"imaginative failure is a datum we must explain, and
fictionality failure is the theoretical posit via which we explain
it" (2015: 8). (See also Gendler 2006, for an elucidation of the
fictionality puzzle as dependent on the imaginative puzzle.)


## 2. Resistance



The use of the word "resistance" in "imaginative
resistance" has been criticized for privileging one of the rival
explanations of imaginative resistance over the others. Three main
rival explanations of imaginative resistance have been provided thus
far: the Cantian, the Wontian, and the Eliminativist (Gendler 2006
coined the first two terms; Gendler and Liao 2016 the third one).
Eliminativists deny that the phenomenon exists outside
philosophers' carefully constructed vignettes. The remaining
camps, while accepting the existence of the phenomenon, present
competing explanations of it. Cantians claim that imaginative
resistance occurs when we *can't* engage in the prompted
imaginative activity. Wontians, by contrast take the phenomenon to
involve *unwillingness* (rather than inability) to engage on
the part of the reader or the audience. Cantians and eliminativists
have been critical of the use of the word "resistance"
because the term itself seems to privilege the Wontian explanation.
Even though some philosophers choose to use "imaginative
failure" instead of "imaginative resistance", the
replacement term has not stuck--after all, this entry itself is
titled "imaginative resistance" (see Stock 2005, Brock
2012, Stear 2015, Tooming 2018). With the acknowledgment that
"imaginative resistance" is an umbrella term for the
phenomenon that some prefer to explain not in terms of
*resistance* but *inability*, let's have a closer
look at competing explanations of imaginative resistance. 


### 2.1 The Sources of Resistance


#### 2.1.1 Cantian theories



Cantians take the puzzles of imaginative resistance to arise due to an
inability. A number of different versions of cantian theories have
been offered and they differ with respect to what they take to be the
cause of the inability. There are two main strands of cantian
theories: (1) ones that take the cause of inability to be a violation
of some type of dependency or grounding relation (dependency-violation
theories), and (2) ones that take the cause to be due to a cognitive
mismatch (mismatch theories).


##### Dependency-Violation Theories



The first formulation of a cantian position appears in Walton 1994. He
claims that the reason why imaginers experience difficulties in
engaging with a fictional work, say one that involves the proposition,
'In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it
was a girl' (I will refer to this proposition as *G*) is
that they cannot allow the fictional world to differ morally from the
actual world (1994: 37). Walton writes, 



> 
> 
> My best suspicion [as to why we resist allowing fictional worlds to
> differ from the real world when we do] is that it has something to do
> with an inability to imagine [certain kinds of dependence] relations
> being different from how we think they are, perhaps an inability to
> understand fully what it would be like for them to be different.
> (Walton 1994: 46; see also Walton 2006: 145)
> 
> 
> 



For Walton, moral principles or properties depend or supervene on
natural properties or facts (1994: 45). Being morally wrong rests on
certain actions such as the deliberate killing of a newborn female
child. That's why we cannot imagine female infanticide being
morally right; we cannot comprehend what it even means. The dependency
relations obtain in all worlds--in the actual world as well as in
any fictional world. We cannot imagine the violation of these
dependency relations even just for the sake of a story. That's
why we cannot accept it as fictionally true that female infanticide is
morally right. 



Walton's explanation of the cause of the inability in terms of
violation of a dependency relation inspired other accounts (Yablo
2002, Weatherson 2004, Stear 2015). Stephen Yablo claims that a
proposition like *G* triggers imaginative resistance because the
concept it expresses is 'grokking' or response-enabled
(2002: 485). Yablo defines a grokking concept as "one that
identifies its object in part by aspects of our experience of it that
don't purport to be representational" (2000
 Other Internet Resources).
 Their extension in a particular context *depends on* how we
ourselves react to them, not how we are represented as reacting or
ought to react in the fictional world (2002: 485). That's why
the extension of the term "morally right" in the context
of *G* does not depend on what the author says but on how it
strikes us. In this case, its extension to female infanticide strikes
us as false, not fictionally true. 



Weatherson, building upon the insights he has drawn from Walton and
Yablo, suggests that the dependency relation that we are invited to
violate in the cases of imaginative resistance is not supervenience
but "virtue":



> 
> 
> *Virtue:* If *p* is the kind of claim that, if true,
> must be true in virtue of lower-level facts, and if the story is about
> those lower-level facts, then it must be true in the story that there
> is some true proposition *r* which is about those lower-level
> facts such that *p* is true in virtue of *r*. (2004:
> 18).
> 
> 
> 



We cannot accept it as fictionally true that Giselda did the right
thing because there are no lower-level facts that are specified by the
narrator or imported by us from our world to support it. (For more on
export-import relations in understanding our engagement with works of
fiction, see
 section 2.1.2.)
 The same also holds for Craig in *Death on a Freeway*. The
claim that Craig did the right thing in killing Jack and Jill cannot
hold in virtue of any of the lower-level facts that are specified in
the story, such as the fact that Craig believed that Jack and Jill
were the cause of the traffic jam. The higher-level facts that what
Giselda or Craig did was wrong are not primitive but they obtain in
virtue of lower-level facts, such as facts about the physical features
of their actions (2004: 16). The fictionality puzzle arises only when
there is a violation of virtue (2004: 24). This violation is
responsible for the authorial breakdown. The phenomenological and
imaginative puzzles follow from the incoherence created by the
violation (2004: 18-20). 



Stear (2015) presents a version of cantianism, but his version does
not take the imaginative failure or fictionality failure to result
from a violation of some kind of metaphysical or conceptual necessity
but rather takes it to result from lack of a proper grounding
relation. Taking up on some of the insights provided by the
eliminativist theories, he claims that imaginative and fictionality
failure arise when a work of fiction embeds a proposition that is
inadequately and exhaustively grounded (2015: 12). *G* is
inadequately grounded because we are on the lookout for a context that
can help us to make sense of the claim. *G* is exhaustively
grounded because no additional context can make it right. 


##### Mismatch Theories



Another strand within cantian explanations of the phenomenon of
imaginative resistance takes the inability on the side of the
imaginers to result from a kind of a cognitive mismatch or conflict.
Jonathan M. Weinberg and Aaron Meskin offer a solution to the puzzle
of imaginative resistance (or as they prefer to call it "the
puzzle of imaginative blockage") on the basis of an empirically
informed cognitive model of imagination developed on the basis of
Shaun Nichols' and Stephen Stich's work on imagination
(Nichols & Stich 2000, 2003a, 2003b; Nichols 2004). On this model,
imaginative resistance arises from a conflict between different
cognitive systems. As elements of our cognitive architecture, Weinberg
and Meskin identify a *belief-box* (containing one's
current beliefs) and an *imagination-box* (containing
one's current imaginings) and the consistency between them is
secured by a mechanism called *updater* which updates
one's beliefs in the face of new information. Another mechanism
is called *inputter* and it is in charge of putting any content
whatsoever in one's imagination box on the basis of one's
decision to do so. There are also domain-specific processes that
interact with both the belief-box and the imagination-box, such as
moral judgment system(s). In the case of imaginative resistance, a
conflict arises between the inputter and the moral judgment system.
Upon encountering the sentence *G*, while the inputter is putting
*G* into the imagination-box, the moral judgment system imposes
an independent moral judgment ~*G* on the basis of the relevant
information provided by the work of fiction. This conflict is noticed
by the updater and the newly added *G* is cancelled out.
Therefore, *G* cannot be held in the imagination-box. 



Tooming (2018), drawing on the insights provided by some of the
wontian and eliminativist theories, differentiates between imagination
and mere supposition (for an overview of other accounts that make this
distinction, see section 2.5 of the entry on
 imagination).
 On Tooming's picture, (engaged) imagination, unlike mere
supposition, requires mental imagery (2018: 690; see the entry on
 mental imagery
 and section 2.3 of the entry on
 imagination).
 Imagining the truth of a proposition in an engaged manner involves
also imagining 



> 
> 
> a fine-grained sensory array or various arrays that are meant to
> correspond to the way that the state of affairs represented by the
> proposition would appear to us. (2018: 691) 
> 
> 
> 



For instance, when we form a mental image of *Giselda*, we
might imagine Giselda's baby wrapped in a pink blanket being
handed to her by the nurse, the look on Giselda's face while
killing her baby, etc. But all these details are regulated by the
proposition we are asked to imagine, namely *G*. For a unitary
act of engaged imagining, Tooming posits that the mental imaginary and
the proposition must match up. In the cases of imaginative resistance,
they do not match. We cannot imagine *G* to be true because our
mental imagery of *G* does not match the content of *G*. One
of the distinguishing features of Tooming's cantian theory is
that it does not presuppose a realist conception of truth in fiction
as others do (e.g., the dependency-violation theories of Walton,
Weatherson, and Yablo). 



Stock (2017) also proposes a version of mismatch cantianism. She
argues that imaginative resistance arises in very particular pragmatic
contexts which contain invitations not to imagine *per se* but
to counterfactually imagine. Invitations to counterfactually imagine
usually involve narrators implying the appropriateness of
counterfactual beliefs about what would follow from some of the
initial premises in the work of fiction. Counterfactual imagining is a
tool that narrators have used to make their audience take on new
beliefs: If the imaginers accept all the premises in the work of
fiction they will arrive at a new belief, usually a new moral belief.
Stock gives the examples of 



> 
> 
> morally didactic fictions such as *Uncle Tom's Cabin*,
> *To Kill a Mockingbird*, or Dickens's *Hard Times*
> 
> 
> 
> 



as works that 



> 
> 
> explicitly have the aim of inculcating certain moral beliefs in this
> way (roughly: if this--indicating some scenario--was real,
> it would be wrong). (2017: 129) 
> 
> 
> 



The resistance raises when an imaginer rejects the beliefs in
questions because they are in conflict with their antecedent beliefs.
In the *Giselda* case, one is not merely refusing to imagine
that *G* is true, but instead refusing to believe that *G*
is true because they already believe ~*G*. The resistance arises
because of a mismatch between one's antecedent beliefs and what
the narrator invites them to believe. 


#### 2.1.2 Wontian theories



Wontian theories explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance in
terms of unwillingness or lack of desire on the side of the imaginer.
Different versions of wontian theories have been proposed and they
differ with respect to how they explain the cause of unwillingness.




Gendler (2000) develops the first contemporary version of a wontian
theory in response to what she perceives as intractable difficulties
facing cantian accounts. Focusing on dependency-violation cantian
theories, she conceives of these accounts as premised on the
unimaginability of impossibilities. The reason we cannot imagine a
proposition such as *G* is that it represents a conceptually
impossible state of affairs and the conceptual impossibility of that
state of affairs renders *G* unimaginable (Gendler 2000: 66 calls
this "the impossibility hypothesis"; see Walton 2006: 145
for his rejection of Gendler's characterization of his account).
Gendler then argues that impossibilities are indeed imaginable because
imagination does not require possibility but rather only
conceivability. To demonstrate this, she concocts a story, *The
Tower of Goldbach*, where twelve turns out to both be and not be
the sum of five and seven (2000: 68, cf. Graham Priest's (1997)
*Sylvan's Box*, where Sylvan finds an empty box that
contains a statue). Even if we are asked to imagine something that is
conceptually impossible, we can do so according to Gendler by
exploiting our capacity for selective attention. By paying attention
to different parts of the story at different times and ignoring others
we can ultimately succeed in imagining a conceptual impossibility.
Given that we *can* imagine what is conceptually impossible,
some further explanation is required as to why we resist imagining
*Giselda* or *Death on the Freeway*. 



Gendler limits her discussion to cases of imaginative resistance that
occur within realist fictions (she calls them "non-distorting
fictions" (2000: 77)). When we read realist works of fiction, we
feel free to import real world facts into the world of fiction.
Indeed, authors presuppose that, in line with the facts they
explicitly state, readers will bring in real world facts to fill in
what is left unsaid in the story. For instance, while reading a
realist fiction, let's call it *Doctors*, about the
intersecting lives of a group of doctors working at a San Francisco
hospital, we might import various facts from our world into the
fictional world of the story, such as the laws of physics, Northern
Californian weather conditions, facts and norms about social
interaction, and so on. At the same time, we feel free to export
fictional truths from *Doctors* that we believe not only hold
in the fictional world of *Doctors* but also in the actual
world. Some of these truths can be added to our repertoire in the same
way that knowledge by testimony is added. For instance, we can export
medical facts from the fiction such as the fact that Graves'
disease can manifest itself as both hyperthyroidism and as an
inflammation of the eyes, or that there is a likelihood that
one's thyroid can grow back even after a total thyroidectomy. We
might also export facts that we come to learn as a result of
reflecting on *Doctors*. We can add such facts as that
workplace romances can get too complicated to our cognitive stock in
the same way that we add knowledge gained by modelling.



In encountering cases of imaginative resistance such as
*Giselda*, we come to feel that it is not just part of the
story that the author wants us to imagine that *G* is true, but
rather that the author actually endorses *G* (the doubling of the
narrator). In this regard, we cannot simply treat the *Giselda*
case like any other typical case of imagining. In the Giselda case, we
feel that we are being asked to export *G* into our world.
Gendler thinks that we are unwilling to engage in the imaginative
activity because in doing so we might export the morally deviant
outlooks to the actual world, something we would naturally want to
avoid. She claims that the 



> 
> 
> cases that evoke genuine imaginative resistance will be cases where
> the reader feels that she is being asked to export a way of looking at
> the actual world which she does not wish to add to her conceptual
> repertoire. (2000: 77)
> 
> 
> 



Here again Gendler stresses that the wontian explanation she provides
is premised on how imagination is distinct from mere supposition and
belief. The difference between them explains our general capacity to
imagine morally deviant situations (because imagination is distinct
from belief) and our general unwillingness to do so (because
imagination is distinct from mere supposition) (2000: 81). 



Gendler (2006) makes revisions to her earlier explanation of
imaginative resistance by downplaying the role of desire and
accentuating the role of principles governing the generation of
fictional truth in works of fiction. 



Gendler's wontianism focuses solely on the interactions between
cognitive imagination and desire while other wontian theories shift
the focus towards the role of conative imagination. Gregory Currie
(2002) differentiates between two modes of imagining, belief-like
(cognitive) imagining and desire-like (conative) imagining. He claims
that imaginative resistance arises due to a lack of relevant
antecedent desire that can ground one's desire-like imaginings.
Some imaginings are belief-like with respect to their inferential
role: imagining that *P* can lead to new imaginings just as
believing that *P* would lead to new beliefs. If one engages in
belief-like imagining some proposition *P* in the course of
reading a story, then they accept *P* as true within the story
and make the appropriate connections and inferences that having such a
belief requires. An example would be imagining that Don Quixote is
fighting a windmill. Desire-like imaginings, on the other hand, are
rather more constrained. Even though we do not seem to have any
problem belief-like imagining something we do not believe, we cannot
as easily desire-like imagine something we do not desire. This is
because desire-like imagining requires there to be an antecedent
desire. There are also internal connections between belief-like
imaginings and desire-like imaginings when it comes to moral matters,
just as there are internal connections between moral beliefs and
desires (e.g., believing that *X* is good also involves desiring
*X*). In an imaginative resistance case such as *Giselda*,
to belief-like imagine that *G* is true requires one to have a
desire-like imagining for female infanticide to occur. Since
one's desire-like imagining is conditioned by their antecedent
desires, to have a desire-like imagining that female infants should be
killed requires one to have an antecedent desire that female infants
should be killed. When one lacks such an antecedent desire, one
experiences imaginative resistance. 



Dustin Stokes (2006) provides a version of wontianism that involves
revising Currie's account by giving the role played by
desire-like imaginings to what he calls "value-like
imaginings". By drawing on David Lewis' account of valuing
(to value xis to desire that one desire *x*--namely,
to have a second-order desire for *x*), Stokes claims that
value-like imagining involves imaginatively desiring to desire that
the world be in a certain way. Imaginative resistance arises for
instance in the case of *Giselda*, when we don't
imaginatively desire that we desire for female infanticide to occur.




Julia Driver (2008) proposes a solution to imaginative resistance that
builds on the work done by Gendler and Weatherson. It would be
incorrect to call it either a strict wontian or cantian account but
ultimately she explains resistance reactions in terms of psychological
necessity. She suggests that it is the psychological necessity of the
claims we take to be morally true that leads to the difficulties we
experience when we are invited to imagine their negations. In some
cases the resistance is due to our unwillingness. In others, 



> 
> 
> we are not *simply* unwilling to entertain their negations,
> but, rather, we do not now have the *desires* needed to do so.
> (2008: 312) 
> 
> 
> 


#### 2.1.3 Eliminativist theories



Eliminativist theories reject the notion that there is a puzzling
phenomenon called imaginative resistance. They claim that what is
depicted by the cantian and the wontian theories alike is that
*some people* might experience *some difficulties* in
engaging with *some imaginative activities* prompted by
*some works of fiction*. But there is nothing unique about this
situation. According to eliminativists, depending on one's own
context and the context specified by the work, resistance reactions
might differ but there is nothing puzzling about this. 



Stock (2005) focuses on the importance of context. She claims that the
reason why we seem to fail to imagine *G* and fail to accept
*G* as true is that we lack a proper context to make it true and
imaginable. When such a context is provided, the resistance reaction
dissipates. *G*, in the absence of such a context, is not
conceptually coherent and that is why we cannot comprehend what
*G* really means. Stock writes, 



> 
> 
> [t]o demonstrate conceptual coherence for [*G*], the right sort
> of fictional context needs to be supplied: for instance, the
> conceptual coherence of [*G*] is demonstrated once one imagines
> that in the town in which Giselda lives, girl children inevitably face
> atrocious lives--are placed into unspeakable slavery, for
> instance--if they are allowed to live. (2005: 617)
> 
> 
> 



She claims that imaginative failure results from "the contingent
incomprehensibility of the relevant proposition" because one
cannot think of a context that would make the proposition we are
prompted to imagine true (2005: 608). The account has been criticized
for disregarding what Weatherson calls the "That's
all" clause that is implicitly embedded in works that trigger
resistance (Weatherson 2004: 20). Of course, the addition of the life
of slavery into the context may affect resistance reactions, but the
whole issue is that there is no such elaborate context supplied by the
author. As long as no such context is implied or explicitly stated, we
should assume that there is nothing more to the *Giselda* story
other than that Giselda did the right thing by killing her baby just
because she was a girl. The question posed by the phenomenon of
imaginative resistance is why we experience imagining *Giselda*
in the way that we do given that we know that it is just fiction. (See
Nanay 2010, for an explanation of imaginative resistance as involving
another type of incomprehensibility. According to Nanay, resistance
arises because the narrator appears to the imaginer to be violating a
maxim akin to Grice's Cooperative Principle. This turns the
imaginer's attention away from the fiction and towards its
author, hence producing the doubling of the narrator effect discussed
by Gendler (Nanay 2010: 591).) 



Todd points out that differences in the context of the fictional
works, as well as differences in our own context as imaginers,
generate a range of possible resistance reactions to the same deviant
contents. Our own context, which is constituted partially by our
further beliefs, commitments, and values, influences not only how we
interpret the proposition we are invited to imagine but also our
evaluations. Todd claims that the strong reactions cantian theories
depict as the "appropriate" responses to scenarios such as
*Giselda* or *Death on the Freeway* are far-fetched and
that only those who share cantians' realist commitments when it
comes to morality or truth in fiction would react in those ways.
Furthermore, not all moral violations are on a par: Thick moral
concepts, as opposed to thin ones, require stronger descriptive and
evaluative conditions. The context specified by the work and our
interpretative context themselves might also have effects on how we
interpret the thickness of concepts. Todd concludes, 



> 
> 
> [f]or, although psychologically interesting, it appears to be a
> 'natural' and entirely un-puzzling feature of imagination
> that it should be so relative; where by 'natural' is meant
> merely that imagining just is a capacity that is subject to degree,
> and dependent on and relative to a range of further beliefs,
> commitments, values and so on. (2009: 198)
> 
> 
> 



The variety of resistance reactions due to the context of the fiction
as well as the imaginer's own context leads eliminativists to
dismiss the phenomenon of imaginative resistance as a genuine
phenomenon (see Tanner 1994 and Mothersill 2003 for other defenses of
eliminativism). However, their insights concerning context relativity
have led to further research on imaginative resistance (more on that
in
 section 2.3).


### 2.2 The Object of Resistance



Another point of contention within imaginative resistance research
concerns the object of resistance. What is involved in our resisting
to engage with a fictional work? So far we have seen various accounts
that attempt to give explanations of imaginative resistance while
assuming that what is resisted is propositional content. There are
other options. According to Moran (1994), our engagement with works of
fiction cannot be reduced merely to imagining propositional contents
but also includes interpretive and emotional responses to fiction. In
point of fact, the content of our engagement is largely
non-propositional. He rejects the clear-cut distinction between the
actual and the fictional and claims that our interpretative and
emotional responses to fiction are actual rather than imagined. Moran
distinguishes between hypothetical and dramatic imagination (1994:
104-5). Hypothetical imagining involves seeing what would follow
from a propositional content you are given, entertaining the
assumption of its truth. Dramatic imagining or imagining with respect
to emotional attitudes involves trying on a perspective, a dramatic
rehearsal so to speak. The phenomenon of imaginative resistance
involves both kinds of imagining. A resistance triggering scenario
would do so because (1) we have difficulties entertaining the
assumption of its truth because the storyline does not add up and (2)
we have difficulties inhabiting the perspective because it is alien to
us. 



One of the problems with Moran's account is that it is not clear
how we can account for what Elizabeth Camp (2017) calls
"disparate response". Disparate response refers to 



> 
> 
> readers' ability and willingness to alter their emotional, moral
> and other evaluative responses from those they would have to the same
> situation in real life. (2017: 73) 
> 
> 
> 



Since Moran challenges the strict actual/fictional divide, he seems to
run into a problem when it comes to explaining disparate response.
Camp (2017), drawing on Moran's work, presents a unified
explanation of both imaginative resistance and disparate responses by
appealing to perspectives. She defines perspective as 



> 
> 
> an open-ended disposition to notice, explain, and respond to
> situations in the world -- an ability to "go on the same
> way" in assimilating and responding to whatever information and
> experiences one encounters. (2017: 78) 
> 
> 
> 



Engaging with works of fiction involves taking on perspectives that
are prescribed by the narrators. That is how non-propositional content
is communicated to audiences. In cases of imaginative resistance, what
we resist is taking on alien perspectives. Our resistance might be
caused by various types of inconsistencies embedded in the work or we
might resist on prudential, moral, or aesthetic grounds. One important
aspect of Camp's theory is that these resistance reactions are
not always voluntary (2017: 92-3). She also argues that her
account has an advantage over competing theories because she does not
reduce the content of imaginings to propositional content. (See also
Goldie 2003, for a similar explanation of imaginative resistance.)


### 2.3 The Scope of Resistance



The proposals put forward by cantians, wontians, and eliminativists
have reshaped the scope of imaginative resistance. Its scope has been
both narrowed down and expanded in different respects. 


#### 2.3.1 Inclusivity



Cantian theories have opened up a theoretical space in which to
question the assumed asymmetry between the imaginability of morally
and nonmorally deviant content. Given that
dependence/supervenience/virtue relations also hold between different
kinds of higher-level and lower-level properties or facts other than
moral kinds, violations of these relations can trigger resistance as
well. Therefore, our list of resistance-triggering claims should be
more inclusive and include not only counter-evaluative claims but also
counter-descriptive claims (inclusivity thesis). Kendall Walton (1994)
claims that other kinds of normative deviances such as aesthetic
deviance can also trigger resistance. Imagine that a comedian in a
story tells a dumb knock knock joke (e.g., "Knock, knock".
"Who's there?" "Cow says". "Cow
says who?" "No, a cow says mooooo!") No matter how
much effort the author thereafter expends, we would not be persuaded
of its hilarity. 



Yablo (2002) argues that imaginative resistance arises due to deviant
use of response-dependent descriptive concepts, such as shape. We
might thereby experience resistance when we are asked to imagine the
beauty and elegance of a monster truck competition or that the
five-fingered maple leaf that Sally is holding is oval. Weatherson
(2004) goes even further to claim that, alongside deviant attribution
of thick moral concepts and deviant evaluative sentences, other
triggers of imaginative resistance include sentences expressing
deviant epistemic evaluations, attributions of mental states,
attributions of mental or linguistic content, deviant use of some
shape predicates, some deviant ontological claims, and deviant claims
about constitution. For instance, according to Weatherson, we cannot
imagine, in an alternative Quixote story of his own concoction, that
Quixote's favorite item of furniture is a television which is
for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from a common knife.
What counts as a television is tied to certain functional roles and
these roles are missing in the story. (See Barnes & Black 2016 and
Kim, Kneer, & Stuart 2019 for empirical studies that examine
whether the type of the deviant claim--its being
counter-evaluative or counter-descriptive--makes a difference in
resistance reactions. On the basis of their studies, Black and Barnes
come to the conclusion that the type of the claim makes vast
individual differences between resistance reactions, while Kim et al.
conclude that "imaginative resistance depends on the weirdness
of content, not whether the claim is evaluative or descriptive"
(2019: 160).)



Anna Mahtani (2012) questions whether it is the case that imaginative
resistance only arises in situations that involve conflict between
some fictional proposition and what we believe to be the case.
Justifications of female infanticide, slavery, or genocide
non-controversially are in conflict with our moral norms. Mahtani
argues against the notion that conflict is a necessary element of
imaginative resistance by claiming that there are cases which (i)
generate imaginative resistance and (ii) are not properly
characterizable as involving a conflict between an utterance in the
fiction and the reader's beliefs. She gives the example of a
story involving a character named Lucy who performs a morally
ambiguous action (2012: 419). Mahtani claims that the author's
pronouncement of the rightness of this morally ambiguous action will
be met with resistance, even though the author's claim does not
directly conflict with our beliefs regarding Lucy's action. 


#### 2.3.2 Genre



One of the main contributions of eliminativist accounts to discussions
regarding the scope of imaginative resistance comes from their
insistence on the importance of context. When this insight is combined
with Gendler's (2000) emphasis on the importance of the realist
genre, the result has been a proliferation of accounts defending the
relevance of genre in determining the quantitative differences between
people's resistance reactions (Weinberg 2008, Nanay 2010, Liao
et al. 2014, Liao 2016). The main idea is that our reactions to the
same moral deviation, let's say female infanticide, can differ
depending on the genre of the work in which they occur. One might take
place in the context of an Aztec or a Greek myth, or science-fiction,
and the other might take place in the context of a realist fiction.
Liao et al. (2014) conducted two empirical studies to put this idea to
the test and demonstrate that genre is salient in explaining
resistance reactions and variations. On the basis of their Study 1,
they concluded that lack of genre competence strongly correlates with
comparative difficulties in imagining a morally deviant proposition
and accepting it as true. On the basis of their Study 2, they
concluded that genre manipulation can lead to variation in the
resistance reactions triggered by the same proposition. (See Phelan
2017 in
 Other Internet Resources
 for a replication of the studies; see Black et al. 2018 for a study
that examines the salience of genre familiarity to resistance
reactions.) 



In his 2016 article, Liao expands on the results of this previous
collaborative research and paper. He claims that the empirical studies
show that genre conventions limit the types of propositions that can
appear within the context of a work, so the fictionality puzzle arises
due to genre convention-discordant propositions (2016; 474). He adds
that each genre convention is associated with different expectations
as to what kind of propositions can appear within this genre (2016:
471). Therefore, the imaginability puzzle arises because we find it
comparatively difficult to imagine genre expectation-discordant
propositions. For instance, in a realistic fiction, we expect all the
propositions to be in compliance with our real-world moral norms. This
expectation does not apply if the work is an Aztec myth or a Greek
tragedy.


#### 2.3.3 Bias



Another ripple effect of eliminativists' theories, particularly
Todd's theory, has been the focus on the importance of the
imaginer's own context for generating variations in imaginative
resistance reactions. Adriana Clavel-Vazquez (2018) discusses a
special kind of imaginative resistance case which makes it clear that
it is not only the context of the fictional work (its genre) that has
effects on our engagement but also our own context as well. The case
she discusses involves rough heroines. 



Rough heroes are deeply morally flawed protagonists that demand
appreciators' allegiance. We owe the term "rough
heroes" to David Hume (1757 [1875: 322]); however it is Anne
Eaton who gives us the list of conditions for being a rough hero
(2012: 281-292). Clavel-Vazquez improves on Eaton's list
(2018: 203): 


1. his moral flaws are grievous,
2. his flaws are an integral part of his personality,
3. the rough hero intentionally engages in immoral actions and his
remorse is not a central part of the narrative,
4. the audience is not prescribed to forgive him or dismiss his
actions as the result of misfortune, weakness, or ignorance,
5. his vices are not outweighed by other morally relevant features.



Some examples given of rough heroes are *Breaking Bad'*s
Walter White and Hannibal Lecter in *Silence of the Lambs.* The
interesting aspect of rough heroes is that even though they have all
these negative characteristics, we still end up aligning ourselves
with them due to pro-attitudes prescribed by the narrative despite the
initial resistance we feel. Indeed, the created tension is necessary
for proper appreciation: the tension between condemning the hero due
to his moral flaws and developing pro-attitudes towards the hero due
to narrative encouragement eventually leads to overcoming our initial
resistance to the hero and to aligning ourselves with him. Eaton
considers this created tension and the subsequent overcoming of the
tension to be the narrative's artistic achievement (2012: 285).




Clavel-Vazquez argues that there exists an asymmetry between rough
heroes and rough heroines (she calls this the "affective
puzzle"). In the case of the rough heroines, it is less likely
for us to overcome our resistance. Indeed, the almost nonexistence of
rough heroines, she claims, attests to that fact. The narrative does
not seem to have equal success when it comes to rough heroines, and
this might be the narrative's fault. We have various examples of
almost-workable rough heroines, such as Amy Dunne in *Gone
Girl*, Claire Underwood in *House of Cards,* and so on. But
we are either not able to feel allegiance with them, or they are not
as ethically transgressive as their male counterparts. (One exception
seems to be Villanelle in *Killing Eve* so far.) Clavel-Vazquez
argues that we resist aligning ourselves with rough heroines because
in being morally transgressive they break with gender norms and
expectations. Our sexist biases affect our resistance reactions.
According to her, this means that when we examine the cause of
imaginative resistance, we need to keep in mind our own interpretative
horizons, which are shaped by our sociocultural context. 



The existence of variation in imaginative resistance reactions led the
eliminativists to conclude that imaginative resistance is not a
genuine phenomenon. Starting with a second wave of research on
imaginative resistance (around 2010), variation is taken to be
something that can be accounted for (see Gendler and Liao 2016 for the
first and second wave distinction). According to some, it should be
accounted for by an all-encompassing theory (e.g., Peterson 2019), and
according to others it should be addressed by adopting explanatory
pluralism (e.g., Liao et al. 2014). This variation-sensitivity has
since been one of the general themes in imaginative resistance
research and one of the influences responsible for the proliferation
of empirical research in the field. (See Black and Barnes 2017 for a
psychological study that aims to show that there are different
influences on our resistance reactions, such as disgust
sensitivity.)


## 3. Imagination



The use of the word "imaginative" in "imaginative
resistance" has been criticized for disregarding the fact that
not all resistance reactions are related to the imagination and it has
been suggested that perhaps imagination might have nothing to do with
the resistance reactions. One of the debates on imaginative resistance
has dealt with whether imaginative resistance cases put constraints on
our cognitive imagination (belief-like imagining) or conative
imagination (desire-like imagining), or fail to put any constraints on
the imagination at all (see sections 2.1 and 2.2 of the entry on
 imagination
 for explanations of the relation between imagination and belief, on
the one hand, and the relation between imagination and desire, on the
other). It is possible to regroup some of the theories of imaginative
resistance that have been covered in
 Section 2,
 alongside other theories, with respect to this debate. 



Miyazono and Liao (2016) take on this task and provide a detailed
taxonomy of the positions in the imaginative resistance literature
with respect to what psychological components of the human mind they
take to be necessary for explaining imaginative resistance. The
theories can be divided into three main groups: cognitive imagination
theories, conative imagination theories, and no-imagination
theories.


### 3.1 Imagination Theories



According to cognitive imagination theories, imaginative resistance
reactions reflect either our inability or unwillingness to take on
belief-like imaginings. We might not be able to take on the imaginings
because cognitive imaginings are processed by the same system that is
in charge of processing similar beliefs (see Nichols 2004, 2006a;
Weinberg & Meskin 2006). Or we might not be able to cognitively
imagine higher-level claims in the absence of support from lower-level
facts because such belief-like imaginings are possible only when they
receive adequate lower-level support as ordinary beliefs do (see
Walton 1994, 2006; Weatherson 2004; Stear 2015). Or we might be unable
or unwilling to take on the belief-like imaginings because we do not
want to export them or believe them given a conflicting belief we hold
or our lack of trust for the narrator (Gendler 2000, 2006; Matravers
2003; Stock 2017). 



According to conative imagination theories, we cannot desire-like or
value-like imagine what we are asked to because we lack the necessary
desire or second-order desire to do so (see Currie 2002 and Stokes
2006). 


### 3.2 No-Imagination Theories



No-imagination theories appeal neither to cognitive imagination nor to
conative imagination in their explanations of the mechanism(s)
involved in the resistance reactions. 



Gendler (2008a, 2008b) claims that alief, which she proposes as an
innate propensity to automatically respond to a real or apparent
stimulus, is what is responsible for resistance reactions, not
imagination (for more on alief, see section 3.3 of the entry on
 imagination).
 Alief is more primitive and fundamental than cognitive or conative
imagination. It is responsible for generating a resistance response to
prompted imaginings due to the perceived (perhaps unconsciously
perceived or registered) possibility of contagion. 



Another explanation of imaginative resistance that locates the source
of resistance reactions somewhere other than the imagination puts
emotions center stage. Ronald de Sousa (2010) claims that what is
going on in resistance cases is not that we are unable to make sense
of the content of the imagined situation but that we fail to
experience certain emotional responses or fail to respond altogether
to certain imagined prospects. For instance, *Giselda*
engenders moral repulsion on the side of the imaginer while
prescribing that they feel moral allegiance or approval. The
knock-knock joke, on the other hand, fails to engender amusement while
the author insists that we find it hilarious.


## 4. Conclusion



As we have seen, in "the puzzle of imaginative resistance"
so far only the word "of" has been uncontentious. However,
this should not be taken as a sign of impasse. Instead of engendering
confusion and disorientation, the liveliness of the debate points to
the richness of the topic and openings for new fronts in imaginative
resistance research. This area of inquiry is still in its early stages
and further research is needed on all of the topics discussed above.
Some of most pressing research questions include: Are there
ungrounded/unjustified imaginative resistance reactions? How can one
overcome ungrounded/unjustified imaginative resistance reactions? How
can we revise the extant theories to account for variation in
resistance reactions and diversity of resistance-triggering claims?
There is much more we can gather from further empirical research on
the topic, and there is plenty of opportunity for further research on
the broader implications imaginative resistance has for fields such as
moral psychology, aesthetic psychology, cognitive architecture,
semantics and pragmatics of evaluative terms, modal epistemology, and
so on (building on the work of scholars such as Levy 2005, Driver
2008, Levin 2012).