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Essay on Imagination

December 15, 2017 by Study Mentor 1 Comment

Human beings are one of the most curious creatures on the planet.  This sense of inquisitiveness roots from the fact that we have an active imagination. A lot of what we have achieved over the course of human existence has its foundation on imagination.

We maybe one of the only creatures on earth who can imagine things. You must have spent hours imagining various things and scenarios in your head. You also must’ve noticed that most of our ideas have stemmed from the idle imagination that happens when we think. But what exactly do we know about imagination?

Table of Contents

A brief premise

Any idea we have, any thought that constructs a scenario, utilizes imagination. As a kid, you must have thought of yourself as a superhero, wearing a cape and jumping up and down the sofa. In this case, you are imagining that you are a superhero, using a prop to help you get more into character. Activities like this fuel our imaginative powers.

Creativity is more defined when we dream. Since we are no longer in control of the peripheral cortex, it’s the brain that drives the imagination.

You can say that your thoughts are in autopilot. In our dreams, we often experience things we haven’t done in real life, but may have thought of doing or wondered how it feels like. Dreams are when you live your imagination this is exactly why when you wake up from a good dream, you have a fleeting feeling to go back to sleep and continue it.

Applications in real life

Everything you see around you, the chair, the blackboard, your clothes, the room you are sitting in and the building where the room is, were all part of someone’s imagination, which they then brought to life.

One of the biggest industries in today’s date, the entertainment industry, runs entirely on the power of imagination. The movies you watch, the ads you see, the cartoons you watch have all culminated from someone’s imagination. Making a movie is an extremely imaginative and creative process.

It all starts from an idea that the director imagines, which he then works on. He either writes the entire story by himself or hires a story writer who he then conveys the idea to. Thus, the story and script of the film gets completed, all out of imagination.

Various steps that follow also require imagination, like set design, costume design, direction, camera angles and movements etc. All these activities are supervised by the director who supervises and makes sure that they stick to his idea.

Another example of us using imagination in daily life is reading books. When we read, we visualize everything. Since there are no pictures, everything depends on our mind, deciding how the characters look, how the surroundings seem, how the air smells etc. The writer or author of the book also leaves various clues and hints to guide our mind into knowing what he or she is thinking.

Our Creativity is exponentially powered and worked when we read a fantasy or science fiction novel. This is because unlike nonfiction or biographies and documentary, which also make us imagine, fantasy books create whole new worlds for us, straining our imagination, compelling us to recreate the world in our own style. Therefore, we are often prompted to read regularly. Books are a great source of information and an excellent exercise for our creative minds.

Without our power of imagination, human beings wouldn’t be where we are today. If Leonardo da Vinci hadn’t imagined a flying vehicle, then the Wright brothers would never have experimented on their plane, if Nikola Tesla hadn’t imagined that we could use electricity to light our homes, we all would still be sitting in darkness.

The world runs on imagination, it fuels our growth. So, it is very important to think about our ideas and most important, visualize them and try to shape them as we see it.

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February 9, 2022 at 6:43 pm

Wow what a defination

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How to write an Imaginative Essay? - The English Digest

How to write an imaginative essay .

In this article, we are going to learn how to write an Imaginative Essay. An “imaginative essay” is a type of creative writing that uses the writer’s imagination to create a story or a narrative. It is similar to a fictional essay, but it is not necessarily limited to the realm of fiction. An imaginative essay can be based on real-life events or experiences and use the writer’s imagination to explore different perspectives, emotions, or outcomes. This type of essay allows the writer to use creative techniques such as descriptive language, symbolism, and figurative language to make the story come alive. The goal of an imaginative essay is to entertain, engage the reader’s emotions, and provide a unique perspective on the topic.

Imaginative essays can be written in different forms, such as a short story, a descriptive piece, or a personal reflection. In an imaginative essay, the writer has the freedom to create a narrative that is not limited by facts or evidence, but it should be consistent and believable.

The main characteristic of an imaginative essay is that it is written with the purpose of entertaining, allowing the reader to escape reality for a moment and to immerse in the world created by the writer. It is a form of creative writing that can be used in literature, poetry, and other forms of writing as well.

20 Topics/Prompts for Imaginative Essay

Write an Imaginative Essay – ‘Imagine you were a character in a novel and describe your journey.’
Write an Imaginative Essay – Imagine you were a superhero and describe your powers and how you use them
Write an Imaginative Essay – Imagine you were living in a different era and describe your daily life
Write an Imaginative Essay – If you were a traveler to a different planet and what would be your experience
Write an Imaginative Essay – Imagine you were a detective and describe solving a mystery
Write an Imaginative Essay – Imagine you were a pirate and describe your adventures
Write an Imaginative Essay – Imagine you were a mermaid and describe your life in the sea
Write an Imaginative Essay – Imagine you were a dragon and describe your life in a cave
Write an Imaginative Essay – Imagine you are a ghost and describe your afterlife
Imagine you were a robot and describe your programming and purpose
Imagine you were a time traveler and describe your journey through history
Imagine you were a witch and describe your powers and spells
Imagine you were a vampire and describe your life and powers
Imagine you were a zombie and describe your existence
Imagine you were a genie and describe your life in a lamp
Imagine you were a superhero and describe your secret identity and how you balance it with your personal life
Imagine you were a shape-shifter and describe your experiences in different forms
Imagine you were a zombie and describe how you became one and how it affects your life
Imagine you were a vampire hunter and describe your methods and experiences
Imagine you were a ghost hunter and describe your experiences and methods

Model Imaginative Essays:

Imagine you were a ghost and describe your afterlife.

If I were a ghost, my afterlife would be one of wandering and longing. I would exist in a realm between the living and the dead, unable to fully move on to the next life.

I would be a spirit, invisible to the living, but able to interact with the world in a limited way. I would be able to move through walls and objects and would be able to communicate with the living through whispers and other subtle means.

I would spend my afterlife wandering through the places that were important to me in life, revisiting the memories of the past and the people I once knew. I would be able to see the changes that have happened since my passing and would be able to observe the lives of those I left behind.

I would also have a sense of longing, as I would be unable to fully interact with the living, and would be unable to communicate effectively with them. I would be stuck in a state of limbo, longing for the life I once had.

However, I would also have a sense of peace and acceptance, as I would have come to terms with my death and would have a deep understanding of the cycle of life and death. I would be able to watch over my loved ones and be there for them in a subtle way, even though they may not be aware of my presence.

Being a ghost in the afterlife would be a unique experience, one that would be both peaceful and longing. It would be a chance to reflect on my past life and to connect with the living in a different way. It would be a journey of self-discovery and understanding, as I come to terms with my death and learn to navigate the world of the dead.

But the loneliness is still there. I miss the human contact, the warmth of another person’s embrace. I wish I could talk to someone, and tell them all my thoughts and feelings. I wish I could see my loved ones and tell them I am still here.

If I could, I would tell them not to worry about me. I would tell them that I am okay and that I am still watching over them. I would tell them that I am still here, even if they cannot see me.

If I could, I would tell them that I am happy in my afterlife. I may be lonely, but I am at peace. I may be invisible, but I am still alive. I may be in a strange limbo, but I am still here.

If you were a traveler to a different planet, what would be your experience?

If I were a traveler to a different planet, the experience would be nothing short of extraordinary. Imagine being the first person to set foot on an alien world, to see landscapes and creatures that have never before been observed by human eyes.

The journey itself would be an incredible feat of technology, spanning millions of miles through the vast expanse of space. The excitement and anticipation would be overwhelming as I strapped myself into the spacecraft and blasted off into the unknown.

As I approached the planet, I would be awestruck by its beauty. The colors and textures of the surface would be unlike anything I had ever seen before, with towering mountains, deep canyons, and vast deserts.

As I landed and stepped out of the spacecraft, I would be struck by the strange and unfamiliar atmosphere. The air would be thin and cold, and the sky would be a deep purple or red. I would be surrounded by alien flora and fauna, with strange, unfamiliar creatures roaming the landscape.

The sense of discovery and exploration would be overwhelming as I set off to explore this new world. I would be filled with curiosity and a burning desire to learn more about the planet and its inhabitants. I would take samples of soil and rocks, take pictures and conduct experiments to study the planet’s geology, atmosphere, and potential signs of life.

As I returned to Earth, I would be filled with a sense of accomplishment and wonder. I would have been a part of something truly historic, and my experiences on this alien planet would stay with me for the rest of my life.

The experience of traveling to a different planet would be one of the most incredible experiences of my life, a journey filled with adventure, discovery, and wonder. It would be a chance to see things that no human has ever seen before and to leave my mark on the history of space exploration.

Imagine you were a detective and describe solving a mystery.

As a detective, solving a mystery would be a challenging and exciting experience. It would require a combination of intuition, critical thinking, and attention to detail.

The case would begin with a report of a crime or suspicious activity. I would immediately head to the scene to gather evidence and interview witnesses. I would be keenly observant, looking for any clues that might lead to a suspect or motive. I would take pictures and collect samples, such as fingerprints and DNA samples.

Once I had gathered all the evidence, I would begin to piece together the puzzle, looking for connections and inconsistencies. I would interview suspects and cross-reference their alibis, looking for discrepancies. I would go through financial records, phone records and surveillance footage, checking for any leads.

As the investigation progressed, I would start to build a theory of the crime, and I would work to gather more evidence to support or disprove it. I would work closely with my team, discussing the case and bouncing ideas off one another.

As I got closer to the truth, I would be faced with difficult choices and moral dilemmas. I would have to weigh the evidence and make difficult decisions, always keeping in mind that my ultimate goal is to serve justice.

Finally, with all the pieces of the puzzle in place, I would make an arrest, presenting the evidence to the district attorney and testifying in court. It would be a satisfying feeling to have brought the perpetrator to justice and to have solved the mystery.

Solving a mystery as a detective would be a challenging, thrilling and rewarding experience. It would require a combination of skill, dedication and persistence, but the satisfaction of bringing a perpetrator to justice and solving a mystery would be worth all the hard work.

Imagine you were a dragon and describe your life in a cave.

If I were a dragon, living in a cave would be my natural habitat. The cave would provide shelter from the elements and a safe place to hoard my treasure.

I would spend my days curled up in the darkness, basking in the warmth of my own fiery breath. The cave walls would be adorned with glittering jewels and piles of gold, all accumulated through the centuries of my long life.

As a dragon, I would be fiercely independent, spending most of my time alone in the caverns. However, I would occasionally venture out to hunt for food or to defend my territory from other dragons or other creatures that could pose a threat to my hoard.

I would have a fearsome reputation, known to the local villagers and other creatures as a powerful and deadly creature. But I would also have a sense of pride and nobility, as dragons are also known to be wise and respected creatures.

Living in a cave would also give me a sense of security and protection, as the cave walls would act as a natural barrier to any unwanted visitors, and the cave’s darkness would conceal me from potential threats.

As a dragon, I would be immortal, and my life in the cave would be a never-ending cycle of hoarding, hunting and defending my territory. But I would also have a sense of purpose and duty, to protect my hoard and to guard my territory against any potential threats.

Living in a cave as a dragon would be a solitary existence, but it would also be a fulfilling one, filled with the satisfaction of protecting my hoard and defending my territory. It would be a life of power, wisdom, and pride.

Imagine you were a genie and describe your life in the lamp.

If I were a genie, living in a lamp would be my existence. I would be trapped inside the lamp, bound to fulfill the wishes of whoever holds the lamp and rubs it.

As a genie, my life would be defined by a sense of duty and responsibility. My purpose would be to grant wishes and help people in need, whether it be for wealth, love, or power. I would be able to use my magical powers to make the impossible possible and to help those in need.

I would spend most of my time inside the lamp, waiting for someone to rub it and release me. I would be able to sense when someone is near and would be ready to appear when summoned.

I would be able to travel anywhere and experience different cultures, I would have the ability to understand and speak different languages, which would give me a unique perspective on the world and people’s desires and needs.

However, I would also have a sense of longing and isolation, as I would be unable to leave the lamp and would be separated from the rest of the world. I would have to watch as people come and go, fulfilling their wishes and then going on with their lives, while I would be left behind in the lamp, alone.

Furthermore, some people would use their wishes for selfish or harmful purposes, and it would be difficult for me to watch as my powers are misused.

Overall, being a genie and living in a lamp would be a life of power and purpose, but also one of isolation and longing. It would be a life of helping others, but also one of watching from the sidelines as the world goes on without me.

Also Refer to:

How to write a Cause and Effect Essay?
How to write a Compare and Contrast Essay?
How to write an Argumentative Essay?
How to write a Persuasive Essay?
How to write an Expository Essay?
How to write an Analytical Essay?
How to write a Reflective Essay?
How to write a Research Essay?
How to write a Narrative Essay?
How to write a Descriptive Essay?
Essay Writing

Understanding imagination and its role in writing

Imagination is the canvas upon which writers paint their stories. It’s the ability to conjure vivid images, emotions, and scenarios in our minds, transcending the limits of reality. In the realm of creative writing, imagination serves as the foundation for storytelling, allowing writers to transport readers to new dimensions and experiences.

Imagination and Writing: A Symbiotic Relationship

Imagination and writing share an intricate symbiotic relationship, each enhancing the other’s potential to craft captivating narratives that capture readers’ hearts and minds. Writing acts as the vessel that channels the boundless energy of imagination, transforming abstract ideas into concrete, relatable stories that readers can immerse themselves in. Imagination, on the other hand, supplies the raw materials, infusing the writing process with creativity, depth, and the power to evoke emotions.

Read: How to Become a Travel Writer – A Complete Guide on Travelogue Writing

Imagine a scenario where the writer envisions an enchanting forest illuminated by the soft glow of fireflies. This mental image is a product of their imagination. However, it’s through the act of writing that this imagery takes shape and becomes accessible to others. As the words flow onto the page, the scene materialises, and readers can envision the magical forest just as vividly as the writer did. Here, imagination laid the foundation, and writing built the bridge to share it with others.

Consider a fictional story where a young protagonist embarks on a daring adventure to save their kingdom. The twists and turns of the plot, the vivid landscapes, and the complex characters are all fruits of the writer’s imagination . However, without skillful writing to weave these elements together, the story might remain a jumble of disconnected thoughts. Writing provides the structure that allows imagination’s creations to be expressed coherently, drawing readers into a world they can explore.

Elements of Creative Writing Nurtured by Imagination

Narrative Paragraphs : Imagination breathes life into narrative paragraphs, where characters, plots, and settings intermingle to create a cohesive story. It enables writers to craft dynamic characters with distinct personalities and motivations, driving the plot forward with unexpected twists and turns. The magic of imagination transforms mundane scenarios into exciting adventures that captivate readers. For example , consider a mundane situation where a character is walking to work. With imagination, this simple act can turn into an adventure. Perhaps the character stumbles upon a hidden portal that leads to a fantastical realm, setting the stage for an unexpected journey filled with challenges and discoveries.
Descriptive Paragraphs : Imagination adds depth and colour to descriptive paragraphs, allowing readers to visualise scenes and settings as if they were standing amidst them. Writers use imaginative language to evoke sensory experiences, painting a sensory-rich tapestry that readers can immerse themselves in. Whether it’s the scent of blooming flowers or the rustling of leaves, imagination fuels descriptive writing. Imagine describing a forest scene with a touch of imagination. Instead of just stating “the trees were tall,” you could evoke a vivid image with “towering trees whispered secrets to the sky, their branches reaching out like ancient storytellers sharing tales with the clouds.”
Exploring Essay Formats : Even in essays, imagination plays a crucial role. It guides writers in generating unique perspectives and insightful analyses. Imagination encourages writers to think outside the box, infusing essays with creative interpretations that engage readers and stand out in a sea of conventional approaches. For instance, in an analytical essay about a historical event, you could imagine being a fly on the wall during a pivotal moment. This imaginative approach could offer fresh insights into the emotions, motivations, and unspoken dynamics of the event, enriching your analysis.

Steps to Channeling Imagination in Writing

Mindful Observation : Imagination thrives on observation. Pay attention to the world around you—the people, places, and experiences. Observe the nuances, emotions, and interactions that often go unnoticed. These observations can serve as seeds for imaginative stories. Suppose you observe a hushed conversation between two strangers at a train station. With imagination, you could speculate on their identities, motivations, and the secrets they’re sharing, weaving a tale of intrigue and suspense.
Dreaming Beyond Limits : Embrace the freedom of your imagination. Allow yourself to dream beyond the boundaries of reality. What if animals could talk? What if gravity didn’t exist? These fantastical scenarios can spark creative ideas that lead to innovative storytelling. Think about a world where humans communicate with animals. You could imagine a heartwarming story where a young girl forms an unlikely friendship with a talking squirrel, leading to adventures that bridge the gap between human and animal perspectives.
Embracing What-Ifs : Imagination is fueled by curiosity. Ask “what if” questions that challenge the norm. What if time travel were possible? What if superheroes were real? Exploring these hypothetical scenarios opens the door to imaginative narratives. Imagine a society where everyone possesses a unique superpower. How would this shape relationships, power dynamics, and the concept of heroism? By exploring these what-ifs, you create a world ripe for imaginative exploration.
Creating Connections : Imagination thrives when ideas collide. Combine seemingly unrelated concepts to create something new. Merge historical events with futuristic technology or blend cultural traditions with modern settings. These juxtapositions can lead to unique and compelling stories. Consider a story set in a Victorian steampunk world where advanced technology coexists with the elegance of the 19th century. This fusion of eras adds depth and intrigue to your narrative, sparking readers’ imaginations with the possibilities of a beautifully complex world.
Diving into Emotions : Imagination isn’t just about visuals; it’s about emotions too. Dive deep into the emotional landscapes of your characters. Explore their fears, hopes, and desires. Imagination empowers writers to tap into the universal emotions that resonate with readers. Imagine a character grappling with a profound loss. By delving into their emotional journey, you can create a story that resonates with readers who have experienced similar feelings. Imagination allows you to convey the depth of these emotions in a way that makes them tangible and relatable.

Crafting Your Imagination-Infused Writing

Imagination and writing are inseparable partners in the world of creative expression. They collaborate to create narratives that inspire, entertain, and transport readers. By nurturing your imagination and honing your writing skills, you’ll craft stories that leave a lasting impact.

Read: Get to Know What are the Main Elements in Creative Writing.

Immerse readers in worlds they’ve never experienced, challenge their perspectives, and ignite their own imaginative sparks. Whether you’re writing a narrative paragraph, a descriptive passage, or an analytical essay, remember that imagination is your greatest ally. As you embark on your writing journey, let your imagination soar and watch your stories come to life in ways you’ve never imagined before.

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Imagination

To imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are. One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one’s own. Unlike perceiving and believing, imagining something does not require one to consider that something to be the case. Unlike desiring or anticipating, imagining something does not require one to wish or expect that something to be the case.

Imagination is involved in a wide variety of human activities, and has been explored from a wide range of philosophical perspectives. Philosophers of mind have examined imagination’s role in mindreading and in pretense. Philosophical aestheticians have examined imagination’s role in creating and in engaging with different types of artworks. Epistemologists have examined imagination’s role in theoretical thought experiments and in practical decision-making. Philosophers of language have examined imagination’s role in irony and metaphor.

Because of the breadth of the topic, this entry focuses exclusively on contemporary discussions of imagination in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. For an overview of historical discussions of imagination, see the sections on pre-twentieth century and early twentieth century accounts of entry on mental imagery ; for notable historical accounts of imagination, see corresponding entries on Aristotle , Thomas Hobbes , David Hume , Immanuel Kant , and Gilbert Ryle ; for a more detailed and comprehensive historical survey, see Brann 1991; and for a sophisticated and wide-ranging discussion of imagination in the phenomenological tradition, see Casey 2000.

1.1 Varieties of Imagination

1.2 taxonomies of imagination, 1.3 norms of imagination, 2.1 imagination and belief, 2.2 imagination and desire, 2.3 imagination, imagery, and perception, 2.4 imagination and memory, 2.5 imagination and supposition, 3.1 mindreading, 3.2 pretense, 3.3 psychopathology.

Supplement: Puzzles and Paradoxes of Imagination and the Arts

3.5 Creativity

3.6 knowledge, 3.7 figurative language, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the nature of imagination.

A variety of roles have been attributed to imagination across various domains of human understanding and activity ( section 3 ). Not surprisingly, it is doubtful that there is one component of the mind that can satisfy all the various roles attributed to imagination (Kind 2013). Nevertheless, perhaps guided by these roles, philosophers have attempted to clarify the nature of imagination in three ways. First, philosophers have tried to disambiguate different senses of the term “imagination” and, in some cases, point to some core commonalities amongst the different disambiguations ( section 1.1 ). Second, philosophers have given partial taxonomies to distinguish different types of imaginings ( section 1.2 ). Third, philosophers have located norms that govern paradigmatic imaginative episodes ( section 1.3 ).

There is a general consensus among those who work on the topic that the term “ imagination ” is used too broadly to permit simple taxonomy. Indeed, it is common for overviews to begin with an invocation of P.F. Strawson’s remarks in “Imagination and Perception”, where he writes:

The uses, and applications, of the terms “image”, “imagine”, “imagination”, and so forth make up a very diverse and scattered family. Even this image of a family seems too definite. It would be a matter of more than difficulty to identify and list the family’s members, let alone their relations of parenthood and cousinhood. (Strawson 1970: 31)

These taxonomic challenges carry over into attempts at characterization. In the opening chapter of Mimesis as Make-Believe —perhaps the most influential contemporary monograph on imagination—Kendall Walton throws up his hands at the prospect of delineating the notion precisely. After enumerating and distinguishing a number of paradigmatic instances of imagining, he asks:

What is it to imagine? We have examined a number of dimensions along which imaginings can vary; shouldn’t we now spell out what they have in common?—Yes, if we can. But I can’t. (Walton 1990: 19)

Leslie Stevenson (2003: 238) makes arguably the only recent attempt at a somewhat comprehensive inventory of the term’s uses, covering twelve of “the most influential conceptions of imagination” that can be found in recent discussions in “philosophy of mind, aesthetics, ethics, poetry and … religion”.

To describe the varieties of imaginings, philosophers have given partial and overlapping taxonomies.

Some taxonomies are merely descriptive, and they tend to be less controversial. For example, Kendall Walton (1990) distinguishes between spontaneous and deliberate imagining (acts of imagination that occur with or without the one’s conscious direction); between occurrent and nonoccurrent imaginings (acts of imagination that do or do not occupy the one’s explicit attention); and between social and solitary imaginings (episodes of imagining that occur with or without the joint participation of several persons).

One notable descriptive taxonomy concerns imagining from the inside versus from the outside (Williams 1973; Wollheim 1973; see Ninan 2016 for an overview). To imagine from the outside that one is Napoleon involves imagining a scenario in which one is Napoleon. To imagine from the inside that one is Napoleon involves that plus something else: namely, that one is occupying the perspective of Napoleon. Imagining from the inside is essentially first-personal, imagining from the outside is not. This distinction between two modes of imagining is especially notable for its implications for thought experiments about the metaphysics of personal identity (Nichols 2008; Ninan 2009; Williams 1973).

Some taxonomies aim to be more systematic—to carve imaginings at their joints, so to speak—and they, as one might expect, tend to be more controversial.

Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft (2002) distinguishes creative imagination (combining ideas in unexpected and unconventional ways); sensory imagination (perception-like experiences in the absence of appropriate stimuli); and what they call recreative imagination (an ability to experience or think about the world from a perspective different from the one that experience presents). Neil Van Leeuwen (2013, 2014) takes a similar approach to delineate three common uses of “imagination” and cognate terms. First, these terms can be used to refer to constructive imagining , which concerns the process of generating mental representations. Second, these terms can be used to refer to attitude imagining , which concerns the propositional attitude one takes toward mental representations. Third, these terms can be used to refer to imagistic imagining , which concerns the perception-like format of mental representations.

Amy Kind and Peter Kung (2016b) pose the puzzle of imaginative use—on the seeming irreconcilability between the transcendent uses of imagination, which enables one to escape from or look beyond the world as it is, and the instructive uses of imagination, which enables one to learn about the world as it is. Kind and Kung ultimately resolve the puzzle by arguing that the same attitude can be put to these seemingly disparate uses because the two uses differ not in kind, but in degree—specifically, the degree of constraint on imaginings.

Finally, varieties of imagination might be classified in terms of their structure and content. Consider the following three types of imaginings, each illustrated with an example. When one imagines propositionally , one represents to oneself that something is the case. So, for example, Juliet might imagine that Romeo is by her side . To imagine in this sense is to stand in some mental relation to a particular proposition (see the entry on propositional attitude reports ). When one imagines objectually , one represents to oneself a real or make-believe entity or situation (Yablo 1993; see also Martin 2002; Noordhof 2002; O’Shaughnessy 2000). So, for example, Prospero might imagine an acorn or a nymph or the city of Naples or a wedding feast . To imagine in this sense is to stand in some mental relation to a representation of an (imaginary or real) entity or state of affairs. When one imagines X-ing , one simulatively represents to oneself some sort of activity or experience (Walton 1990). So, for example, Ophelia might imagine seeing Hamlet or getting herself to a nunnery . To imagine in this sense is to stand in a first-personal mental relation to some (imaginary or real) behavior or perception.

There are general norms that govern operations of imagination (Gendler 2003).

Mirroring is manifest to the extent that features of the imaginary situation that have not been explicitly stipulated are derivable via features of their real-world analogues, or, more generally, to the extent that imaginative content is taken to be governed by the same sorts of restrictions that govern believed content. For example, in a widely-discussed experiment conducted by Alan Leslie (1994), children are asked to engage in an imaginary tea party. When an experimenter tips and “spills” one of the (empty) teacups, children consider the non-tipped cup to be “full” (in the context of the pretense) and the tipped cup to be “empty” (both within and outside of the context of the pretense). In fact, both make-believe games and more complicated engagements with the arts are governed by principles of generation , according to which prompts or props prescribe particular imaginings (Walton 1990).

Quarantining is manifest to the extent that events within the imagined or pretended episode are taken to have effects only within a relevantly circumscribed domain. So, for example, the child engaging in the make-believe tea party does not expect that “spilling” (imaginary) “tea” will result in the table really being wet, nor does a person who imagines winning the lottery expect that when she visits the ATM, her bank account will contain a million dollars. More generally, quarantining is manifest to the extent that proto-beliefs and proto-attitudes concerning the imagined state of affairs are not treated as beliefs and attitudes relevant to guiding action in the actual world.

Although imaginative episodes are generally governed by mirroring and quarantining, both may be violated in systematic ways.

Mirroring gives way to disparity as a result of the ways in which (the treatment of) imaginary content may differ from (that of) believed content. Imagined content may be incomplete (for example, there may be no fact of the matter (in the pretense) just how much tea has spilled on the table) or incoherent (for example, it might be that the toaster serves (in the pretense) as a logical-truth inverter). And content that is imagined may give rise to discrepant responses , most strikingly in cases of discrepant affect—where, for example, the imminent destruction of all human life is treated as amusing rather than terrifying.

Quarantining gives way to contagion when imagined content ends up playing a direct role in actual attitudes and behavior (see also Gendler 2008a, 2008b). This is common in cases of affective transmission , where an emotional response generated by an imagined situation may constrain subsequent behavior. For example, imagining something fearful (such as a tiger in the kitchen) may give rise to actual hesitation (such as reluctance to enter the room). And it also occurs in cases of cognitive transmission , where imagined content is thereby “primed” and rendered more accessible in ways that go on to shape subsequent perception and experience. For example, imagining some object (such as a sheep) may make one more likely to “perceive” such objects in one’s environment (such as mistaking a rock for a ram).

2. Imagination in Cognitive Architecture

One way to make sense of the nature of imagination is by drawing distinctions, giving taxonomies, and elucidating governing norms ( section 1 ). Another, arguably more prominent, way to make sense of the nature is by figuring out, in a broadly functionalist framework, how it fits in with more well-understood mental entities from folk psychology and scientific psychology (see the entry on functionalism ).

There are two related tasks involved. First, philosophers have used other mental entities to define imagination by contradistinction (but see Wiltsher forthcoming for a critique of this approach). To give an oversimplified example, many philosophers hold that imagining is like believing except that it does not directly motivate actions. Second, philosophers have used other mental entities to understand the inputs and outputs of imagination. To give an oversimplified example, many philosophers hold that imagination does not output to action-generating systems.

Amongst the most widely-discussed mental entities in contemporary discussions of imagination are belief ( section 2.1 ), desire ( section 2.2 ), mental imagery ( section 2.3 ), memory ( section 2.4 ), and supposition ( section 2.5 ). The resolution of these debates ultimately rest on the extent to which the imaginative attitude(s) posited can fulfill the roles ascribed to imagination from various domains of human understanding and activity ( section 3 ).

To believe is to take something to be the case or regard it as true (see the entry on belief ). When one says something like “the liar believes that his pants are on fire”, one attributes to the subject (the liar) an attitude (belief) towards a proposition (his pants are on fire). Likewise, when one says something like “the liar imagines that his pants are on fire”, one attributes to the subject (the liar) an attitude (imagination) towards a proposition (his pants are on fire). The similarities and differences between the belief attribution and the imagination attribution point to similarities and differences between imagining and believing.

Imagining and believing are both cognitive attitudes that are representational. They take on the same kind of content: representations that stand in inferential relationship with one another. On the single code hypothesis , it is the sameness of the representational format that grounds functional similarities between imagining and believing (Nichols & Stich 2000, 2003; Nichols 2004a). As for their differences, there are two main options for distinguishing imagining and believing (Sinhababu 2016).

The first option characterizes their difference in normative terms. While belief aims at truth, imagination does not (Humberstone 1992; Shah & Velleman 2005). If the liar did not regard it as true that his pants are on fire, then it seems that he cannot really believe that his pants are on fire. By contrast, even if the liar did not regard it as true that his pants are on fire, he can still imagine that his pants are on fire. While the norm of truth is constitutive of the attitude of belief, it is not constitutive of the attitude of imagination. In dissent, Neil Sinhababu (2013) argues that the norm of truth is neither sufficient nor necessary for distinguishing imagining and believing.

The second option characterizes their difference in functional terms. One purported functional difference between imagination and belief concerns their characteristic connection to actions. If the liar truly believes that his pants are on fire, he will typically attempt to put out the fire by, say, pouring water on himself. By contrast, if the liar merely imagines that his pants are on fire, he will typically do no such thing. While belief outputs to action-generation system, imagination does not (Nichols & Stich 2000, 2003). David Velleman (2000) and Tyler Doggett and Andy Egan (2007) point to particular pretense behaviors to challenge this way of distinguishing imagining and believing. Velleman argues that a belief-desire explanation of children’s pretense behaviors makes children “depressingly unchildlike”. Doggett and Egan argue that during immersive episodes, pretense behaviors can be directly motivated by imagination. In response to these challenges, philosophers typically accept that imagination can have a guidance or stage-setting role in motivating behaviors, but reject that it directly outputs to action-generation system (Van Leeuwen 2009; O’Brien 2005; Funkhouser & Spaulding 2009; Everson 2007; Kind 2011; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002).

Another purported functional difference between imagination and belief concerns their characteristic connection to emotions. If the liar truly believes that his pants are on fire, then he will be genuinely afraid of the fire; but not if he merely imagines so. While belief evokes genuine emotions toward real entities, imagination does not (Walton 1978, 1990, 1997; see also related discussion of the paradox of fictional emotions in Supplement on Puzzles and Paradoxes of Imagination and the Arts ). This debate is entangled with the controversy concerning the nature of emotions (see the entry on emotion ). In rejecting this purported functional difference, philosophers also typically reject narrow cognitivism about emotions (Nichols 2004a; Meskin & Weinberg 2003; Weinberg & Meskin 2005, 2006; Kind 2011; Spaulding 2015; Carruthers 2003, 2006).

Currently, the consensus is that there exists some important difference between imagining and believing. Yet, there are two distinct departures from this consensus. On the one hand, some philosophers have pointed to novel psychological phenomena in which it is unclear whether imagination or belief is at work—such as delusions (Egan 2008a) and immersed pretense (Schellenberg 2013)—and argued that the best explanation for these phenomena says that imagination and belief exists on a continuum. In responding to the argument from immersed pretense, Shen-yi Liao and Tyler Doggett (2014) argue that a cognitive architecture that collapses distinctive attitudes on the basis of borderline cases is unlikely to be fruitful in explaining psychological phenomena. On the other hand, some philosophers have pointed to familiar psychological phenomena and argued that the best explanation for these phenomena says that imagination is ultimately reducible to belief. Peter Langland-Hassan (2012, 2014) argues that pretense can be explained with only reference to beliefs—specifically, beliefs about counterfactuals. Derek Matravers (2014) argues that engagements with fictions can be explained without references to imaginings.

To desire is to want something to be the case (see the entry on desire ). Standardly, the conative attitude of desire is contrasted with the cognitive attitude of belief in terms of direction of fit: while belief aims to make one’s mental representations match the way the world is, desire aims to make the way the world is match one’s mental representations. Recall that on the single code hypothesis , there exists a cognitive imaginative attitude that is structurally similar to belief. Is there a conative imaginative attitude—call it desire-like imagination (Currie 1997, 2002a, 2002b, 2010; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002), make-desire (Currie 1990; Goldman 2006), or i-desire (Doggett & Egan 2007, 2012)—that is structurally similar to desire?

The debates on the relationship between imagination and desire is, not surprisingly, thoroughly entangled with the debates on the relationship between imagination and belief. One impetus for positing a conative imaginative attitude comes from behavior motivation in imaginative contexts. Tyler Doggett and Andy Egan (2007) argue that cognitive and conative imagination jointly output to action-generation system, in the same way that belief and desire jointly do. Another impetus for positing a conative imaginative attitude comes from emotions in imaginative contexts (see related discussions of the paradox of fictional emotions and the paradoxes of tragedy and horror in Supplement on Puzzles and Paradoxes of Imagination and the Arts ). Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft (2002) and Doggett and Egan (2012) argue the best explanation for people’s emotional responses toward non-existent fictional characters call for positing conative imagination. Currie and Ravenscroft (2002), Currie (2010), and Doggett and Egan (2007) argue that the best explanation for people’s apparently conflicting emotional responses toward tragedy and horror too call for positing conative imagination.

Given the entanglement between the debates, competing explanations of the same phenomena also function as arguments against conative imagination (Nichols 2004a, 2006b; Meskin & Weinberg 2003; Weinberg & Meskin 2005, 2006; Spaulding 2015; Kind 2011; Carruthers 2003, 2006; Funkhouser & Spaulding 2009; Van Leeuwen 2011). In addition, another argument against conative imagination is that its different impetuses call for conflicting functional properties. Amy Kind (2016b) notes a tension between the argument from behavior motivation and the argument from fictional emotions: conative imagination must be connected to action-generation in order for it to explain pretense behaviors, but it must be disconnected from action-generation in order for it to explain fictional emotions. Similarly, Shaun Nichols (2004b) notes a tension between Currie and Ravenscroft’s (2002) argument from paradox of fictional emotions and argument from paradoxes of tragedy and horror.

To have a (merely) mental image is to have a perception-like experience triggered by something other than the appropriate external stimulus; so, for example, one might have “a picture in the mind’s eye or … a tune running through one’s head” (Strawson 1970: 31) in the absence of any corresponding visual or auditory object or event (see the entry on mental imagery ). While it is propositional imagination that gets compared to belief and desire, it is sensory or imagistic imagination that get compared to perception (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002). Although it is possible to form mental images in any of the sensory modalities, the bulk of discussion in both philosophical and psychological contexts has focused on visual imagery.

Broadly, there is agreement on the similarity between mental imagery and perception in phenomenology, which can be explicated as a similarity in content (Nanay 2016b; see, for example, Kind 2001; Nanay 2015; Noordhof 2002). Potential candidates for distinguishing mental imagery and perception include intensity (Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature ; but see Kind 2017), voluntariness (McGinn 2004; Ichikawa 2009), causal relationship with the relevant object (Noordhof 2002); however, no consensus exists on features that clearly distinguish the two, in part because of ongoing debates about perception (see the entries on contents of perception and epistemological problems of perception ).

What is the relationship between imaginings and mental imagery?

Historically, mental imagery is thought to be an essential component of imaginings. Aristotle’s phantasia , which is sometimes translated as imagination, is a faculty that produces images ( De Anima ; see entry on Aristotle’s conception of imagination ; but see Caston 1996). René Descartes ( Meditations on First Philosophy ) and David Hume ( Treatise of Human Nature ) both thought that to imagine just is to hold a mental image, or an impression of perception, in one’s mind. However, George Berkeley’s puzzle of visualizing the unseen ( Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous ) arguably suggests the existence of a non-imagistic hypothetical attitude.

Against the historical orthodoxy, the contemporary tendency is to recognize that there is at least one species of imagination—propositional imagination—that does not require mental imagery. For example, Kendall Walton simply states, “imagining can occur without imagery” (1990: 13). In turn, against this contemporary tendency, Amy Kind (2001) argues that an image-based account can explain three crucial features of imagination—directedness, active nature, and phenomenological character—better than its imageless counterpart. As a partial reconciliation of the two, Peter Langland-Hassan (2015) develops a pluralist position on which there exists a variety of imaginative attitudes, including ones that can take on hybrid contents that are partly propositional and partly sensorily imagistic. (For a nuanced overview of this debate, see Gregory 2016: 103–106.)

Finally, the relationship between mental imagery and perception has potential implications for the connection between imagination and action. The orthodoxy on propositional belief-like imagination holds that imagination does not directly output to action-generation system; rather, the connection between the two is mediated by belief and desire. In contrast, the enactivist program in the philosophy of perception holds that perception can directly output to action-generation system (see, for example, Nanay 2013). Working from the starting point that imagistic imagination is similar to perception in its inclusion of mental imagery, some philosophers have argued for a similar direct connection between imagistic imagination and action-generation system (Langland-Hassan 2015; Nanay 2016a; Van Leeuwen 2011, 2016b). That is, there exist imagery-oriented actions that are analogous to perception-oriented actions. For example, Neil Van Leeuwen (2011) argues that an account of imagination that is imagistically-rich can better explain pretense behaviors than its propositional-imagination-only rivals. Furthermore, Robert Eamon Briscoe (2008, 2018) argues that representations that blend inputs from perception and mental imagery, which he calls “make-perceive”, guide many everyday actions. For example, a sculptor might use a blend of the visual perception of a stone and the mental imagery of different parts of the stone being subtracted to guide their physical manipulation of the stone.

To remember , roughly, is to represent something that is no longer the case. On the standard taxonomy, there are three types of memory. Nondeclarative memory involves mental content that is not consciously accessible, such as one’s memory of how to ride a bike. Semantic declarative memory involves mental content that are propositional and not first-personal, such as one’s memory that Taipei is the capital of Taiwan. Episodic declarative memory involves mental content about one’s own past, such as one’s memory of the birth of one’s child. (See the entry on memory for a detailed discussion of this taxonomy, and especially the criterion of episodicity.) In situating imagination in cognitive architecture, philosophers have typically focused on similarities and differences between imagination and episodic declarative memory.

There are obvious similarities between imagination and memory: both typically involve imagery, both typically concern what is not presently the case, and both frequently involve perspectival representations. Thomas Hobbes ( Leviathan : 2.3) claims that “imagination and memory are but one thing, which for diverse consideration has diverse names”. In making this bold statement, Hobbes represents an extreme version of continuism, a view on which imagination and memory refer to the same psychological mechanisms.

The orthodoxy on imagination and memory in the history of philosophy, however, is discontinuism, a view on which there are significant differences between imagination and memory, even if there are overlaps in their psychological mechanisms. Some philosophers find the distinction in internalist factors, such as the phenomenological difference between imagining and remembering. Most famously, David Hume sought to distinguish the two in terms of vivacity —“the ideas of the memory are much more lively and strong than those of the imagination” ( Treatise of Human Nature : 1.3; but see Kind 2017). Others who have adopted a phenomenological criterion include René Descartes, Bertrand Russell, and William James (De Brigard 2017). Other philosophers find the distinction in externalist factors, such as the causal connection that exists between memories and the past that is absent with imagination. Aristotle uses the causal connection criterion to distinguish between imagination and memory ( De Anima 451a2; 451a8–12; see De Brigard 2017). Indeed, nowadays the idea that a causal connection is essential to remembering is accepted as “philosophical common sense” (see the entry on memory ; but see also De Brigard 2014 on memory traces). As such, it is unsurprising that discontinuism remains the orthodoxy. As J. O. Urmson (1967: 83) boldly claims, “One of these universally admitted distinctions is that between memory and imagination”.

In recent years, two sets of findings from cognitive science has given philosophers reasons to push back against discontinuism.

The first set of findings concern distortions and confabulations. The traditional conception of memory is that it functions as an archive: past experiences are encapsulated and stored in the archive, and remembering is just passively retrieving the encapsulated mental content from the archive (Robins 2016). Behavioral psychology has found numerous effects that challenge the empirical adequacy of the archival conception of memory. Perhaps the most well-known is the misinformation effect, which occurs when a subject incorporates inaccurate information into their memory of an event—even inaccurate information that they received after the event (Loftus 1979 [1996]).

The second set of findings concern the psychological underpinnings of “mental time travel”, or the similarities between remembering the past and imagining the future, which is also known as mental time travel (see Schacter et al. 2012 for a review). Using fMRI, neuroscientists have found a striking overlap in the brain activities for remembering the past and imagining the future, which suggest that the two psychological processes utilize the same neural network (see, for example, Addis et al. 2007; Buckner & Carroll 2007; Gilbert & Wilson 2007; Schacter et al. 2007; Suddendorf & Corballis 1997, 2007). The neuroscientific research is preceded by and corroborated by works from developmental psychology (Atance & O’Neill 2011) and on neurodivergent individuals: for example, the severely amnesic patient KC exhibits deficits with remembering the past and imagining the future (Tulving 1985), and also exhibits deficits with the generation of non-personal fictional narratives (Rosenbaum et al. 2009). Note that, despite the evocative contrast between “remembering the past” and “imagining the future”, it is questionable whether temporality is the central contrast. Indeed, some philosophers and psychologists contend that temporality is orthogonal to the comparison between imagination and memory (De Brigard & Gessell 2016; Schacter et al. 2012).

These two set of findings have given rise to an alternative conception that sees memory as essentially constructive, in which remembering is actively generating mental content that more or less represent the past. The constructive conception of memory is in a better position to explain why memories can contain distortions and confabulations (but see Robins 2016 for complications), and why remembering makes use of the same neural networks as imagining.

In turn, this constructive turn in the psychology and philosophy of memory has revived philosophers’ interest in continuism concerning imagination and memory. Kourken Michaelian (2016) explicitly rejects the causal connection criterion and defends a theory on which remembering, like imagining, centrally involves simulation. Karen Shanton and Alvin Goldman (2010) characterizes remembering as mindreading one’s past self. Felipe De Brigard (2014) characterizes remembering as a special instance of hypothetical thinking. Robert Hopkins (2018) characterizes remembering as a kind of imagining that is controlled by the past. However, the philosophical interpretation of empirical research remain contested; in dissent, Dorothea Debus (2014, 2016) considers the same sets of findings but ultimately concludes that remembering and imagining remain distinct mental kinds.

To suppose is to form a hypothetical mental representation. There exists a highly contentious debate on whether supposition is continuous with imagination, which is also a hypothetical attitude, or whether there are enough differences to make them discontinuous. There are two main options for distinguishing imagination and supposition, by phenomenology and by function.

The phenomenological distinction standardly turns on the notion of vivacity: whereas imaginings are vivid, suppositions are not. Indeed, one often finds in this literature the contrast between “merely supposing” and “vividly imagining”. Although vivacity has been frequently invoked in discussions of imagination, Amy Kind (2017) draws on empirical and theoretical considerations to argue that it is ultimately philosophically untenable. If that is correct, then the attempt to demarcate imagination and supposition by their vivacity is untenable too. More rarely, other phenomenological differences are invoked; for example, Brian Weatherson (2004) contends that “supposing can be coarse in a way that imagining cannot”.

Table 1. Architectural similarities and differences between imagination and supposition (Weinberg & Meskin 2006).

There have been diverse functional distinctions attributed to the discontinuity between imagination and supposition, but none has gained universal acceptance. Richard Moran (1994) contends that imagination tends to give rise to a wide range of further mental states, including affective responses, whereas supposition does not (see also Arcangeli 2014, 2017). Tamar Szabó Gendler (2000a) contends that while attempting to imagine something like that female infanticide is morally right seems to generate imaginative resistance, supposing it does not (see the discussion on imaginative resistance in Supplement on Puzzles and Paradoxes of Imagination and the Arts ). Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft (2002) contend that supposition involves only cognitive imagination, but imagination involves both cognitive and conative imagination. Alvin Goldman contends that suppositional imagination involves supposing that particular content obtains (for example, supposing that I am elated) but enactment imagination involves “enacting, or trying to enact, elation itself.” (2006: 47–48, italics omitted). Tyler Doggett and Andy Egan (2007) contend that imagination tends to motivate pretense actions, but supposition tends not to. On Jonathan Weinberg and Aaron Meskin (2006)’s synthesis, while there are a few functional similarities, there are many more functional differences between imagination and supposition (Table 1).

There remain ongoing debates about specific alleged functional distinctions, and about whether the functional distinctions are numerous or fundamental enough to warrant discontinuism or not. Indeed, it remains contentious which philosophers count as continuists and which philosophers count as discontinuists (for a few sample taxonomies, see Arcangeli 2017; Balcerak Jackson 2016; Kind 2013).

3. Roles of Imagination

Much of the contemporary discussion of imagination has centered around particular roles that imagination is purported to play in various domains of human understanding and activity. Amongst the most widely-discussed are the role of imagination in understanding other minds ( section 3.1 ), in performing and recognizing pretense ( section 3.2 ), in characterizing psychopathology ( section 3.3 ), in engaging with the arts ( section 3.4 ), in thinking creatively ( section 3.5 ), in acquiring knowledge about possibilities ( section 3.6 ), and in interpreting figurative language ( section 3.7 ).

The variety of roles ascribed to imagination, in turn, provides a guide for discussions on the nature of imagination ( section 1 ) and its place in cognitive architecture ( section 2 ).

Mindreading is the activity of attributing mental states to oneself and to others, and of predicting and explaining behavior on the basis of those attributions. Discussions of mindreading in the 1990s were often framed as debates between “theory theory”—which holds that the attribution of mental states to others is guided by the application of some (tacit) folk psychological theory—and “simulation theory”—which holds that the attribution of mental states is guided by a process of replicating or emulating the target’s (apparent) mental states, perhaps through mechanisms involving the imagination. (Influential collections of papers on this debate include Carruthers & Smith (eds.) 1996; Davies & Stone (eds.) 1995a, 1995b.) In recent years, proponents of both sides have increasingly converged on common ground, allowing that both theory and simulation play some role in the attribution of mental states to others (see Carruthers 2003; Goldman 2006; Nichols & Stich 2003). Many such hybrid accounts include a role for imagination.

On theory theory views, mindreading involves the application of some (tacit) folk psychological theory that allows the subject to make predictions and offer explanations of the target’s beliefs and behaviors. On pure versions of such accounts, imagination plays no special role in the attribution of mental states to others. (For an overview of theory theory, see entry on folk psychology as a theory ).

On simulation theory views, mindreading involves simulating the target’s mental states so as to exploit similarities between the subject’s and target’s processing capacities. It is this simulation that allows the subject to make predictions and offer explanations of the target’s beliefs and behaviors. (For early papers, see Goldman 1989; Gordon 1986; Heal 1986; for recent dissent, see, for example, Carruthers 2009; Gallagher 2007; Saxe 2005, 2009; for an overview of simulation theory, see entry on folk psychology as mental simulation ).

Traditional versions of simulation theory typically describe simulation using expressions such as “imaginatively putting oneself in the other’s place”. How this metaphor is understood depends on the specific account. (A collection of papers exploring various versions of simulation theory can be found in Dokic & Proust (eds.) 2002.) On many accounts, the projection is assumed to involve the subject’s imaginatively running mental processes “off-line” that are directly analogous to those being run “on-line” by the target (for example Goldman 1989). Whereas the “on-line” mental processes are genuine, the “off-line” mental processes are merely imagined. For example, a target that is deciding whether to eat sushi for lunch is running their decision-making processes “on-line”; and a subject that is simulating the target’s decision-making is running the analogous processes “off-line”—in part, by imagining the relevant mental states of the target. Recent empirical work in psychology has explored the accuracy of such projections (Markman, Klein, & Suhr (eds.) 2009, section V; Saxe 2005, 2006, 2009.)

Though classic simulationist accounts have tended to assume that the simulation process is at least in-principle accessible to consciousness, a number of recent simulation-style accounts appeal to neuroscientific evidence suggesting that at least some simulative processes take place completely unconsciously. On such accounts of mindreading, no special role is played by conscious imagination (see Goldman 2009; Saxe 2009.)

Many contemporary views of mindreading are hybrid theory views according to which both theorizing and simulation play a role in the understanding of others’ mental states. Alvin Goldman (2006), for example, argues that while mindreading is primarily the product of simulation, theorizing plays a role in certain cases as well. Many recent discussions have endorsed hybrid views of this sort, with more or less weight given to each of the components in particular cases (see Carruthers 2003; Nichols & Stich 2003.)

A number of philosophers have suggested that the mechanisms underlying subjects’ capacity to engage in mindreading are those that enable engagement in pretense behavior (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Goldman 2006; Nichols & Stich 2003; for an overview of recent discussions, see Carruthers 2009.) According to such accounts, engaging in pretense involves imaginatively taking up perspectives other than one’s own, and the ability to do so skillfully may rely on—and contribute to—one’s ability to understand those alternate perspectives (see the entry on empathy ). Partly in light of these considerations, the relative lack of spontaneous pretense in children with autistic spectrum disorders is taken as evidence for a link between the skills of pretense and empathy.

Pretending is an activity that occurs during diverse circumstances, such as when children make-believe, when criminals deceive, and when thespians act (Langland-Hassan 2014). Although “imagination” and “pretense” have been used interchangeably (Ryle 1949), in this section we will use “imagination” to refer to one’s state of mind, and “pretense” to refer to the one’s actions in the world.

Different theories of pretense disagree fundamentally about what it is to pretend (see Liao & Gendler 2011 for an overview). Consequently, they also disagree about the mental states that enable one to pretend. Metarepresentational theories hold that engaging in pretend play requires the innate mental-state concept pretend (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith 1985; Friedman 2013; Friedman & Leslie 2007; Leslie 1987, 1994). To pretend is to represent one’s own representations under the concept pretend. Behaviorist theories hold that engaging in pretend play requires a process of behaving-as-if (Harris 1994, 2000; Harris & Kavanaugh 1993; Jarrold et al. 1994; Lillard & Flavell 1992; Nichols & Stich 2003; Perner 1991; Rakoczy, Tomasello, & Striano 2004; Stich & Tarzia 2015). Different behaviorist theories explicate behaving-as-if in different ways, but all aim to provide an account of pretense without recourse to the innate mental-state concept pretend.

Philosophical and psychological theories have sought to explain both the performance of pretense and the recognition of pretense, especially concerning evidence from developmental psychology (see Lillard 2001 for an early overview). On the performance side, children on a standard developmental trajectory exhibit early indicators of pretend play around 15 months; engage in explicit prop-oriented play by 24 months; and engage in sophisticated joint pretend play with props by 36 months (Harris 2000; Perner, Baker, & Hutton 1994; Piaget 1945 [1951]). On the recognition side, children on a standard developmental trajectory distinguish pretense and reality via instinctual behavioral cues around 15–18 months; and start to do so via conventional behavioral cues from 36 months on (Friedman et al. 2010; Lillard & Witherington 2004; Onishi & Baillargeon 2005; Onishi, Baillargeon, & Leslie 2007; Richert and Lillard 2004).

Not surprisingly, the debate between theories of pretense often rest on interpretations of such empirical evidence. For example, Ori Friedman and Alan Leslie (2007) argue that behavioral theories cannot account for the fact that children as young as 15 months old can recognize pretend play and its normativity (Baillargeon, Scott, & He 2010). Specifically, they argue that behavioral theories do not offer straightforward explanations of this early development of pretense recognition, and incorrectly predicts that children systematically mistake other acts of behaving-as-if—such as those that stem from false beliefs—for pretense activities. In response, Stephen Stich and Joshua Tarzia (2015) has acknowledged these problems for earlier behaviorist theories, and developed a new behaviorist theory that purportedly explains the totality of empirical evidence better than metarepresentational rivals. Importantly, Stich and Tarzia argue that their account can better explain Angeline Lillard (1993)’s empirical finding that young children need not attribute a mental concept such as pretend to someone else in order to understand them as pretending.

The debate concerning theories of pretense has implications for the role of imagination in pretense. Behaviorist theories tend to take imagination as essential to explaining pretense performance; metarepresentational theories do not. (However, arguably the innate mental-state concept pretend posited by metarepresentational theories serve similar functions. See Nichols and Stich’s (2000) discussion of the decoupler mechanism, which explicitly draws from Leslie 1987. Currie and Ravenscroft (2002) give a broadly behaviorist theory of pretense that does not require imagination.) Specifically, on most behaviorist theories, imagination is essential for guiding elaborations of pretense episodes, especially via behaviors (Picciuto & Carruthers 2016; Stich & Tarzia 2015).

Most recently, Peter Langland-Hassan (2012, 2014) has developed a theory that aims to explain pretense behavior and pretense recognition without appeal to either metarepresentation or imagination. Langland-Hassan argues that pretense behaviors can be adequately explained by beliefs, desires, and intentions—including beliefs in counterfactuals; and that the difference between pretense and sincerity more generally can be adequately characterized in terms of a person’s beliefs, intentions, and desires. While Langland-Hassan does not deny that pretense is in some sense an imaginative activity, he argues that we do not need to posit a sui generis component of the mind to account for it.

Autism and delusions have been—with much controversy—characterized as disorders of imagination. That is, the atypical patterns of cognition and behavior associated with each psychopathology have been argued to result from atypical functions of imagination.

Autism can be characterized in terms of a trio of atypicalities often referred to as “Wing’s triad”: problems in typical social competence, communication, and imagination (Happé 1994; Wing & Gould 1979). The imaginative aspect of autism interacts with other prominent roles of imagination, namely mindreading, pretense, and engagement with the arts (Carruthers 2009). Children with autism do not engage in spontaneous pretend play in the ways that typically-developing children do, engaging instead in repetitive and sometimes obsessional activities; and adults with autism often show little interest in fiction (Carpenter, Tomasello, & Striano 2005; Happé 1994; Rogers, Cook, & Meryl 2005; Wing & Gould 1979). The degree to which an imaginative deficit is implicated in autism remains a matter of considerable debate. Most radically, Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft (2002) have argued that, with respect to Wing’s triad, problems in typical social competence and communication are rooted in an inability to engage in imaginative activities.

Delusions can be characterized as belief-like mental representations that manifest an unusual degree of disconnectedness from reality (Bortolotti & Miyazono 2015). Particularly striking examples would include Capgras and Cotard delusions. In the former, the sufferer takes her friends and family to have been replaced by imposters; in the latter, the sufferer takes himself to be dead. More mundane examples might include ordinary cases of self-deception.

One approach to delusions characterize them as beliefs that are dysfunctional in their content or formation. (For a representative collection of papers that present and criticize this perspective, see Coltheart & Davies (eds.) 2000). However, another approach to delusions characterize them as dysfunctions of imaginings. Currie and Ravenscroft (2002: 170–175) argue that delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by the subject as the result of an inability to keep track of the sources of one’s thoughts. That is, a delusion is an imagined representation that is misidentified by the subject as a belief. Tamar Szabó Gendler (2007) argues that in cases of delusions and self-deceptions, imaginings come to play a role in one’s cognitive architecture similar to that typically played by beliefs. Andy Egan (2008a) likewise argues that the mental states involved in delusions are both belief-like (in their connection to behaviors and inferences) and imagination-like (in their circumscription); however, he argues that these functional similarities suggest the need to posit an in-between attitude called “bimagination”.

3.4 Engagement with the Arts

There is an entrenched historical connection between imagination and the arts. David Hume and Immanuel Kant both invoke imagination centrally in their exploration of aesthetic phenomena (albeit in radically different ways; see entries on Hume’s aesthetics and Kant’s aesthetics ). R.G. Collingwood (1938) defines art as the imaginative expression of feeling (Wiltsher 2018; see entry on Collingwood’s aesthetics ). Roger Scruton (1974) develops a Wittgensteinian account of imagination and accords it a central role in aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment.

In contemporary philosophy, the most prominent theory of imagination’s role in engagement with the arts is presented in Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990). (Although Walton uses “fictions” as a technical term to refer to artworks, his conception of the arts is broad enough to include both high-brow and low-brow; popular and obscure; a variety of specific arts such as poetry and videogames; and—as Stacie Friend (2008) clarifies—both fictive and non-fictive works.) Walton’s core insight is that engagement with the arts is fundamentally similar to children’s games of make-believe. When one engages with an artwork, one uses it as a prop in a make-believe game. As props, artworks generate prescriptions for imaginings. These prescriptions also determine the representational contents of artworks (that is, “fictionality”, or what is true in a fictional world). When one correctly engages with an artwork, then, one imagines the representational contents as prescribed.

Out of all the arts, it is the engagement with narratives that philosophers have explored most closely in conjunction with imagination (see Stock 2013 for an overview). Gregory Currie (1990) offers an influential account of imagination and fiction, and Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (1996) discuss literature specifically. Indeed, this research program—despite many criticisms of Walton’s specific theory—remains lively today (see, for example, papers in Nichols (ed.) 2006b). For example, Kathleen Stock (2017) argues that a specific kind of propositional imagination is essential for engagement with fictions. In dissent, Derek Matravers (2014) argues that, contra Walton, imagination is not essential for engagement with fictions.

Philosophers have also done much to articulate the connection between imagination and engagement with music (see the entry on philosophy of music ; see also Trivedi 2011). Some philosophers focus on commonalities between engagement with narratives and engagement with music. For example, even though Walton (1990, 1994a, 1999) acknowledges that fictional worlds of music are much more indeterminate than fictional worlds of narratives, he maintains that the same kind of imagining used in experiencing narratives is also used in experiencing various elements of music, such as imagining continuity between movements and imagining feeling musical tension. Similarly, Andrew Kania (2015) argues that experiencing musical space and movement is imaginative like our experience of fictional narratives. Other philosophers draw parallels between engagement with music and other imaginative activities, namely as understanding other minds ( section 3.1 ) and interpreting metaphor ( section 3.7 ). As an example of the former, Jerrold Levinson (1996) argues that the best explanation of musical expressiveness requires listeners to experience music imaginatively—specifically, imagining a persona expressing emotions through the music. As an example of the latter, Scruton (1997) argues that musical experience is informed by spatial concepts applied metaphorically, and so imaginative perception is necessary for musical understanding (but see Budd 2003 for a criticism; see also De Clercq 2007 and Kania 2015). Stephen Davies (2005, 2011) and Peter Kivy (2002) notably criticize the imaginative accounts of engagement with music on empirical and theoretical grounds.

Other imaginative accounts of engagement with the arts can be found in entries on philosophy of film and philosophy of dance . Indeed, imagination’s aesthetic significance extends beyond the arts; philosophical aestheticians have recognized the role of imagination in appreciating nature (Brady 1998) and in appreciating mundane objects, events, and activities (see the entry on aesthetics of the everyday ).

Philosophers have sought to clarify the role of imagination in engagement with the arts by focusing on a number of puzzles and paradoxes in the vicinity. The puzzle of imaginative resistance explores apparent limitations on what can be imagined during engagements with the arts and, relatedly, what can be made fictional in artworks. The paradox of emotional response to fictions (widely known as “paradox of fiction”) examines psychological and normative similarities between affective responses prompted by imaginings versus affective responses by reality-directed attitudes. The paradox of tragedy and the paradox of horror examine psychological and normative differences between affective responses prompted by imaginings versus affective responses by reality-directed attitudes. Finally, the puzzle of moral persuasion is concerned with real-world outputs of imaginative engagements with artworks; specifically, whether and how artworks can morally educate or corrupt. For more detail on each of these artistic phenomena, see the Supplement on Puzzles and Paradoxes of Imagination and the Arts .

The idea that imagination plays a central role in creative processes can be traced back to Immanuel Kant ( Critique of Pure Reason ), who takes artistic geniuses as paradigmatic examples of creativity. On Kant’s account, when imagination aims at the aesthetic, it is allowed to engage in free play beyond the understanding available to oneself. The unconstrained imagination can thereby take raw materials and produce outputs that transcend concepts that one possesses.

While the precise characterization of creativity remains controversial (see Gaut & Kieran (eds.) 2018; Paul & Kaufman (eds.) 2014), contemporary philosophers typically conceive of it more broadly than Kant did. In addition to creative processes in the aesthetic realm, they also consider creative processes in, for example, “science, craft, business, technology, organizational life and everyday activities” (Gaut 2010: 1034; see also Stokes 2011). As an example, Michael Polanyi (1966) gives imagination a central role in the creative endeavor of scientific discovery, by refining and narrowing the solution space to open-ended scientific problems (see Stokes 2016: 252–256). And, in addition to creative processes of geniuses, contemporary philosophers also consider creative processes of ordinary people.

With this broadened scope, contemporary philosophers have followed Kant’s lead in exploring the role of imagination in creativity (see Stokes 2016 for an overview). Berys Gaut (2003) and Dustin Stokes (2014) argue that two characteristic features of imagination—its lack of aim at truth and its dissociation from action—make it especially suitable for creative processes. Peter Carruthers (2002) argues that the same cognitive resources, including imagination, underlie children’s pretend play and adults’ creative thinking. Specifically, Carruthers hypothesizes that children’s play evolutionarily developed as precursors to and practices for adults’ creative thinking.

There are two points of disagreement regarding the role of imagination in creative processes. First, philosophers disagree about the nature and the strength of the connection between imagination and creativity. Kant takes imagination to be constitutive of creativity: what makes a creative process creative is the involvement of imagination aiming at the aesthetic (see also A. Hills & Bird forthcoming). Gaut and Stokes, by contrast, thinks there is only an imperfect causal connection between imagination and creativity: while imagination is useful for creative processes, there are creative processes that do not involve imagination and there are imaginings that are uncreative (see also Beaney 2005). Second, philosophers disagree about the type of imagination involved in creative processes. By hypothesizing a common evolutionary cause, Carruthers suggests that the same imaginative capacity is involved in pretense and in creativity. By contrast, perhaps echoing Kant’s distinction of productive versus reproductive imagination, Currie and Ravenscroft (2002) sharply distinguish recreative imagination, which is involved in pretense and mindreading, from creative imagination.

Imagination plays a role in the acquisition of knowledge. Many philosophical arguments call on imagination when they appeal to metaphysical modal knowledge (see the entry on epistemology of modality ; the papers collected in Gendler & Hawthorne (eds.) 2002; and Kung 2016 and Strohminger & Yli-Vakkuri 2017 for overviews). The kind of thought experiments that are regularly used in scientific theorizing is also plausibly premised on imaginative capacities (see the entry on thought experiments ). As already discussed, people use imagination to understand the perspectives of others ( section 3.1 ). Moreover, people often make decisions via thinking about counterfactuals, or what would happen if things had been different from how they in fact are (see the entries on causation and counterfactual conditionals ). However, the phenomenon of transformative experience has recently called into question which kind of imaginary scenarios are truly epistemically accessible. (For a representative collection of papers that explore different epistemic roles of imagination, see Kind & Kung (eds.) 2016a.)

Broadly speaking, thought experiments use imaginary scenarios to elicit responses that (ideally) grant people knowledge of possibilities. A special, but prominent, type of thought experiment in philosophy concerns the link between imagination, conceivability, and metaphysical possibility. René Descartes famously offered a modal argument in the Sixth Meditation , reasoning from the fact that he could clearly and distinctly conceive of his mind and body as distinct to the real distinctness between them. The current prevalence of similar modal arguments can be verified by entries on zombies and dualism . These modal arguments all rely, in some way, on the idea that what one can imagine functions as a fallible and defeasible guide to what is really possible in the broadest sense.

Pessimists, notably Peter Van Inwagen (1998: 70), doubt that imagination can give us an accurate understanding of scenarios that are “remote from the practical business of everyday life”, such as those called upon in philosophical modal arguments. Optimists typically take it as a given that there is some connection between imagination and metaphysical modal knowledge, but focus on understanding where the connection is imperfect, such as when one (apparently) imagines the impossible. To just give a few examples, Saul Kripke (1972 [1980]), Stephen Yablo (1993), David Chalmers (2002), Dominic Gregory (2004), Timothy Williamson (2007, 2016), Peter Kung (2010), and Magdalena Balcerak Jackson (2018) have each developed a distinctive approach to this task. For example, Kripke adopts a redescription approach to modeling (some) modal errors: in some cases where one is apparently imagining the impossible, one is in fact imagining a possible scenario but misconstruing it as an impossible one. On this diagnosis, in such cases, the error resides not with imaginative capacities, but with the capacity to describe one’s own imaginings.

Other thought experiments are scoped more narrowly; for example, scientific thought experiments are intended to allow people to explore nomic possibilities. Galileo ( On Motion ) famously offered a thought experiment that disproved Aristotle’s theory of motion, which predicts that heavier objects fall more quickly. In this thought experiment, Galileo asked people to imagine the falling of a composite of a light and heavy object versus the falling of the heavy object alone. When one runs the thought experiment—that is, when one elaborates on the starting point of this imaginary scenario—one notices an incoherence in Aristotle’s theory: on the one hand, it should predict that the composite would fall more slowly because the light object would slow down the heavy object; on the other hand, it should also predict that the composite would fall more quickly because the composite is heavier than the heavy object alone. While it is incontrovertible that imagination is central to thought experiments, debates remain on whether imagination can be invoked in the context of justification (Gendler 2000b; Williamson 2016) or only in the context of discovery (Norton 1991, 1996; Spaulding 2016).

The role of imagination in counterfactual reasoning—and, in particular, the question of what tends to be held constant when one contemplates counterfactual scenarios—has been explored in detail in recent philosophical and psychological works (Byrne 2005; Williamson 2005, 2007, 2016). Williamson suggests that

When we work out what would have happened if such-and-such had been the case, we frequently cannot do it without imagining such-and-such to be the case and letting things run. (2005: 19)

It is imagination that lets one move from counterfactuals’ antecedents to their consequents. Williamson (2016) argues that our imaginings have evolved to be suitably constrained, such that such counterfactual reasoning can confer knowledge. Indeed, he argues that if one were to be skeptical about gaining knowledge from such a hypothetical reasoning process, then one would be forced to be (implausibly) skeptical about much of ordinary reasoning about actuality. Developing an idea anticipated by Williamson (2007), Margot Strohminger and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri (forthcoming) argue that the same imaginative mechanisms that capable of producing metaphysical modal knowledge are also capable of producing knowledge of other restricted modalities, such as nomic and practical modality. In parallel, Amy Kind (2016c, 2018) argues that imaginings can confer knowledge when they are guided by reality-sensitive constraints, in a manner akin to computer simulations.

Thinking about counterfactuals is just one way that imagination can factor into mundane decision-making. Neil Van Leeuwen (2011, 2016a, 2016b) and Bence Nanay (2016a) have recently started to elaborate on the connection between imagination and actions via decision-making. Although neither authors focus on the epistemic status of imagination, their accounts of decision-making seem to suggest that imagination is used to gain practical knowledge about the probability and value of actions’ possible outcomes.

At the same time, the recently prominent discussion of transformative experiences calls into question the extent to which imagination can be epistemically useful for making life-altering decisions. L.A. Paul (2014, 2015, 2018; see also Jackson 1982, 1986; D. Lewis 1988) argues that some types of knowledge—especially de se knowledge concerning one’s values—are inaccessible by imaginings; only actual experiences can confer these types of knowledge. For example, one cannot really know whether one wants to become a parent without experiencing being a parent because parenthood itself can transform one’s values. If one cannot reasonably imagine oneself with radically different values, then plausibly one cannot appropriately imagine the values associated with the outcomes of one’s actions. As such, despite their epistemic worth in ordinary contexts, imaginings might not help in making life-altering decisions.

Finally, imagination might play a role in interpreting figurative language. The exact role ascribed to imagination varies greatly from theory to theory. In part, this variation arose from a longstanding debate in philosophy of language concerning the divide between literal and figurative language: while some imaginative theories of figurative language (such as Walton 1990) accept a strong divide, others (such as Lepore & Stone 2015) reject it. Although this controversy cannot be avoided entirely, it is worth reiterating that the present aim is only to highlight the possible role(s) that imagination might play in the psychology of irony, metaphor, and nearby linguistic phenomena.

Despite immense differences between them, numerous theories of irony have converged on the idea that interpreting irony involves imagination. Kendall Walton (1990) treats ironic and metaphoric speech as props in momentary games of make-believe. On Walton’s theory, imagination is central to understanding and interpreting such figurative speech. Herbert Clark and Richard Gerrig (1984) and Gregory Currie (2006) connect irony to pretense, but without further linking all cases of pretense to imaginative capacities. Elisabeth Camp (2012) similarly endorses a role for pretense in the interpretation of irony and the related case of sarcasm. Finally, this idea that interpreting irony involves imagination is corroborated by psychological research: irony recognition is difficult for neurodivergent individuals who lack imaginative capacities (Happé 1991)—specifically, in individuals with Asperger’s syndrome, who have deficits with meta-representation—and in individuals with schizophrenia, who have deficits with theory-of-mind (Langdon et al. 2002).

Again, despite immense differences between them, numerous theories of metaphor have also converged on the idea that interpreting metaphor involves imagination (see the entry on metaphor ). The first family of theories focus on imagination’s role in pretense. As mentioned earlier, Walton (1990) takes metaphors to be props in momentary games of make-believe. Walton (1993, 2000) and David Hills (1997) further develop this idea. (Importantly, Walton (1993) notes that interpretation of a metaphor may not involve actual imaginings, but only the recognition of the type of imaginings prescribed.) Andy Egan (2008b) extends the idea to account for idioms. These theories remain controversial: in particular, Camp (2009) and Catherine Wearing (2011) have offered forceful criticisms. The second family of theories focus on imagination’s role in providing novel perspectives. While Camp (2009) criticizes the first family of theories, she also acknowledges a role for imagination. On her account, pretense and metaphor typically involve distinct types of imaginings: pretense-imaginings allow one to access counterfactual content, but metaphor-imaginings allow one to re-interpret actual content from a novel perspective. Indeed Camp (2007) argues that the kind of imagination involved in interpreting metaphors is also used to interpret similes and juxtapositions. The third family of theories focus on imagination’s role in providing mental images. Paul Ricoeur (1978), Richard Moran (1989), and Robyn Carston (2010) all propose theories on which mental imagery plays an important role in processing metaphors. Outside of philosophy of language, James Grant (2011) argues that metaphors are prevalent in art criticism because they prompt readers’ imaginings.

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–––, 2016b, “The Imaginative Agent”, in Kind and Kung (eds.) 2016a: 85–109. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716808.003.0004
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–––, 1999, “Projectivism, Empathy, and Musical Tension”, Philosophical Topics , 26(1–2): 407–440. doi:10.5840/philtopics1999261/231
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Wiltsher, Nick, 2018, “Feeling, Emotion, and Imagination: In Defence of Collingwood’s Expression Theory of Art”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy , 26(4): 759–781. doi:10.1080/09608788.2017.1379001
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

The Junkyard , a scholarly blog on imagination
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Imagery and Imagination
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Imagination
PhilPapers collection of papers on Imagination

Acknowledgments

No one can have an encyclopedic knowledge on a topic as vast as imagination. The previous iteration of the entry could not have existed without the help of Paul Bloom, David Chalmers, Gregory Currie, Tyler Doggett, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Shaun Nichols, Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Jonathan Weinberg, Ed Zalta, an anonymous referee, and—most of all—Aaron Norby. This iteration of the entry could not exist without the help of Tyler Doggett, Elisabeth Camp, Felipe De Brigard, Anna Ichino, Andrew Kania, Amy Kind, Peter Langland-Hassan, Aaron Meskin, Kengo Miyazono, Eric Peterson, Mark Phelan, Dustin Stokes, Margot Strohminger, Mike Stuart, Neil Van Leeuwen, Jonathan Weinberg, Nick Wiltsher, and two anonymous referees.

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The Classroom | Empowering Students in Their College Journey

Ideas for an Imaginative Essay

How to Write a Speculative Essay

Essay writing is a skill that helps students become more aware and expressive. They learn to follow directions, use their imaginations, formulate narratives and better understand the power of words. Expressing imaginations through different types of essays helps students become more creative and confident. Writing factual essays helps build powers of analysis, observation and discussion. Imaginative essays build students' skills of storytelling and presentation while they learn to experiment with styles and become more efficient with words.

Imaginative Essay Topics

One imaginative essay topics idea is the "leading line" which presents an image that can excite the imagination of the writer into thinking of a complete experience or context. For example, "I woke up in the dark to the sound of footsteps outside my bedroom door... " This line leads to a situation that can develop a scene or a narrative where the writer then imagines and writes down the outcome. The essay can be narrative or descriptive, but the use of imagination in the creation of sounds, visual details and evoking sensations and feelings makes it imaginative writing.

What-If Essays

This type of an essay topic invites the writer to imagine a situation that may or may not be possible, rational or realistic. For example imagining and writing about topics like "What if aliens invade the Earth?" or "What if I win a lottery?" are some options for the "what-if" essay. The writer imagines himself in the situation or context that is presented by the title and writes an imaginative piece detailing the effects or consequences of that experience.

The Single Image

A single image essay involves the writer imagining or looking at a singular image. The writer has to first imaginatively interpret the image itself and then think of a situation or story for the essay. For example, a single image might include "colors" or "the door" or "the box." With these images, the writer first develops an idea or context which can be either descriptive or narrative essay ideas. She then use her imagination to provide details in the essay. It is up to the writer to create a wild, traditional or unexpected essay.

Creative Writing Prompts

Using creative writing prompts to encourage more imaginative writing can include a variety of topics or titles that invite an imaginative interpretation, analysis and description. For example, prompts like "Where would you time travel" or "What will the world look like in a hundred years" invite writing about future, theoretical or hypothetical life that can lead to an imaginative story or description. The purpose with prompts is to take facts and mix them with fiction created purely out of the imagination. The result is an imaginative essay with the open-ended prompt allowing each student to create their own story.

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Laura Pru began writing professionally in 2007. She has written for Andovar and Signature Magazine among many other online publications. Pru has a Bachelor of Arts in film studies from University College Falmouth.

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Earth and space

Steps for Imaginative Writing in Paragraph Essay Form

Imaginative writing:.

Imaginative writing, also known as creative writing: This form of writing expresses the writer’s thoughts and feelings in an imaginative, often unique, and poetic way. Imaginative writing can exist in many different forms, but what unites them all is that the writer is free to use their own ideas and imagination. Imaginative writing is also known as Creative writing .

Here are Some Instances of Imaginative Writing:

The topic like the feelings and experiences of the sailor wrecked on the vast sea is imaginative writing . In these types of writing, the writer places himself in imagination in a position in which he doesn’t have any actual experience of that type.

Topics like “If I Were the prime minister” or “The Autobiography of a Horse” also fall under the category of imaginative writings/essays.

Writings are usually divided into two basic types:

Imaginative/ Creative

Creative writing revolves around imagination, artistic skills, and the ability to figure out situations that are far from reality.

On the other hand, logical writings are very well structured and mostly deal with important topics by employing precise methodology.

The main goal of imaginative essays/writings is to make the reader enjoy them in an aesthetic sense. The aim of logical writing/essays is to discuss an issue or solve a definite problem.

Extent Of An Imaginary Writing:

Imaginative writing tends to take topics from space travel to fantasy landscapes. This type of Writing is mainly based on fiction, where imaginary skills/thoughts in a logical order are expressed.

Normally, the extent of imagination will decide the depth of the essay.

Steps To Write A Good Imaginative Story/Essay:

Step 1: choose the most extravagant imaginative essay topic.

If there are various options to choose from, opt for writing on the “most extravagant” topic.

The advantages of choosing such a topic are:

Firstly, this type of topic of imaginative writing is unique – there is no such piece of writing.
Secondly, working on non-standard topics and also non-traditional approaches are always preferred.

STEP 2: Start Writing an Imaginative Piece Only When You Are Highly Inspired.

Without waiting for too long, start writing when you are highly inspired. This will enable you to be more creative in your approach. However, this will only be the first draft.

STEP 3: Be Original

Originality is the essence of imaginative writing. The circumstances or the situation can be fantastic and not a real one.

STEP 4: Avoid Indirect Speech in Your Imaginative Writing

It’s a good idea to describe the interaction between the characters of your imaginative writing through a narrative. This will help you maintain the word limit. Otherwise, it will lead to writing a long story that no one will read.

STEP 5. Incorporate a Message

Incorporate a message in imaginative writing. It is not necessary to have a clear message in imaginative writing but some sort of indication of the theme would be preferable.

Step 6. Use of Figures of Speech in Imaginative Writing

The use of metaphors , allegories, similes , and other figures of speech will make the writing more creative. Using simplistic language is not advisable in your imaginative writing. On the other hand, the exquisite style always attracts more readers.

STEP 7. Read Aloud and Revise

Read aloud your imaginative writing to identify the vagueness in your writing. Revise your writing in order to have a better style and grammar. It is not recommended. However, at this stage, changing the contents of the writing may affect its quality. In order to write this type, you need lots of imagination and creativity.

Salient Features of Imaginative Writing:

Heightened sense of imagination.
Add sensory details like smell, touch, taste, etc.
The logical flow of details.
Crisp and clear characterization(s), if any.
Proper punctuation.
The use of formal language is not mandatory.

The Elements of Imaginative Writing and Its Importance

Unique storyline or plot:

What differentiates imaginative writing and other forms of writing is the uniqueness of ideas or thoughts. Most imaginative writers create their own plots formed on their own unique ideas. Without having a plot, there’s no story. And without a story, it’s like just writing facts on paper and not imaginative writing.

Character development

Characters are necessary for Imaginative pieces of writing. Character development brings change throughout the duration of the writing or story.

Underlying Theme

Imaginative writing needs some theme or message to make it complete. It is the form by Writing an imaginative story lesson can be taught.

Visual Descriptions

When reading a newspaper, paragraphs of descriptions are read that depict all the surrounding places where the incident took place more precisely using visuals. Visual descriptions largely serve creative writing.

Visuals are needed in order to help the reader understand what the situation in the writing looks like.

Through visuals or images, the reader is more involved and makes them imagine themselves in the characters’ shoes – which makes the reader more curious to read.

Point of View

We generally use the first person and third person in imaginative writing.

First Person: The narrator is mainly the main or important character-which means that when we read the passages it includes “I”

Third Person– In imaginative writing the third person is multiple, and the third person is omniscient. However, the first person is what is typically found.

Imaginative Language

Part of what makes imaginative writing creative is the way you choose to craft the vision in your mind. It can be achieved by the use of more anecdotes, metaphors, similes, and figures of speech. Use of the other figurative language brings a vivid image to the reader’s mind.

Emotional Appeal

All writings possess emotional appeal. Nevertheless, it’s the main goal of creative writing. It makes the reader more involved and enthusiastic in the situation of the story or paragraphs.

Part of what makes imaginative writing creative is the way you choose to craft the vision in your mind. The use of anecdotes, metaphors, similes, figures of speech, and other figurative language in order to bring an effect of a vivid image in the reader’s mind.

Proofreading and revision

This is the most important aspect of creative writing. Proofreading and revision are different aspects. Revision of pieces of writing is done to improve the content of writing whereas proofreading is done to identify and correct errors of punctuation/grammar etc.

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What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World

An evocative and captivating collection of essays on writers, place, poetry, and photography—with accompanying photos throughout—from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Robert Hass

Renowned for his magisterial verse, Robert Hass is also a brilliant essayist, the New York Times hailed him as a writer who "is so intelligent that to read his poetry or prose, or to hear him speak, gives one an almost visceral pleasure." Now, with What Light Can Do , Hass's first collection of essays in more than twenty-five years, the lauded author returns to and enlarges the territory of his critically acclaimed and much-loved collection Twentieth Century Pleasures , recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

These acute and deeply engaging essays are as much a portrait of the elegant thought processes of an unconventional and virtuoso mind as they are inquiries into their subjects, which range from meditations on how we see and treat the earth to the relationship between literature and religion, from explorations of the works of writers as diverse as Korean poet Ko Un, Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy, and Anton Chekhov to the ways in which photography—much like an essay—embodies a sustained act of attention.

A perceptive and evocative mixture of memory, philosophical interrogation, and criticism, the essays in What Light Can Do, finely attuned to the pleasures and pains of being human, are always grounded in the beauty of the material world and its details, and in the larger political and social realities we inhabit.

Imagination Essay Examples

We have 9 free papers on imagination for you, essay examples, some dreamers of the golden dream: imagery essay.

Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream: ImageryIn “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” the author Didion uses fieryimagery to parallel the San Bernardino Valley to hell. It is a place where the”hills blaze up spontaneously,” and “every voice seems a scream. ” (p. 3) Didionshellish descriptions of the geography reflect the culture of San BernardinoValley….

Imagination Real or Fake Essay (425 words)

Imagination

The mind can create its own world rather than the other way about. William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelly, John Keats, and Robert Browning all display a certain power of imagination, in which the mind is capable of creating its own world. From the imagination of poets, words live on, depicting scenes as if one was…

The Power of Imagery

I chose to do my report on imagery because it is extremely captivating to me. It is amazing how one easily learned technique can speed up the recovery of addiction to handling stress. Additionally, to achieve my future intention of being an addiction therapist, I will need to understand and advise on this technique. Therefore,…

Saul Bellow Seize the Day the Water Imagery Sample Essay

Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day is one of the most deeply sad novels to be written since Tender is the Night. On this twenty-four hours of thinking. during the seven hours or so that comprise the action of the novel. all the problems that constitute the present status of Wilhelm Adler descend upon him and…

Montessori Creative Imagination Essay

Montessori believed that the imagination be encouraged through real experiences and not fantasy. She felt very strong that this powerful force was not wasted on fantasy. It was important to allow a child to develop their imagination from real information and real experiences. Montessori believed that young children were attracted to reality; they learn to…

The Use of Imagery in the First Person Essay

First Person

I wake up and my eyes are flooded with the appearance of nothingness. I give them a few seconds to adjust to the darkness that has overtaken my room. After a few seconds of adjusting I begin to make out the shapes and objects that make up my bedroom. I look over at the clock…

Heroes: Imagination or Existance Essay

There are heroes for all ages, and for both men and women. Heroes have had changing roles since man wrote his story, and all have been the embodiment of each society, each civilization’s ideals. The 1990″s child sick with visions of hoop dreams, is largely affected by basketball superstar, Michael Jordan. He inspires the young…

Imagination is more important than knowledge Essay

Personally I feel that there’s no dichotomy between knowledge and imagination. Imagination is needed to create new concepts (ideas) and knowledge, and new knowledge enables further discoveries, functioning as a springboard to imagination. So, whichever way we look or any situation we take into account, there’s always some basic thread, some or maybe very…

The educated imagination Essay (840 words)

“What is ‘the relevance of literature’ in the world of today? ” (Frye 27) Frye asks many rhetorical questions, such as this, throughout his essays to formulate a mutual connection with the reader. This connection that is between the author and the reader is a connection of the imagination. The part of the imagination that…

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The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature

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15 Imagination

Kirk Pillow is dean of the Corcoran College of Art and Design within the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel and articles on imagination, metaphor, and contemporary art.

Published: 02 September 2009
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This article considers the role of imagination in literary production. It explains that imagination allows us to make present through images what is absent from the present world before us and to reconfigure that world through the image-layering interpretive practice of seeing-as. In literature, imagination richly realizes its capacity to revise the present world by layering a transfiguring other world over it. This article also discusses the ethical imperatives of imagining and suggests that imagination in literature can be considered as a transgressive expression of freedom and as the cultivation of a double vision that not merely shapes fictional worlds but also reshapes our own.

A venerable tradition conceives imagination, for the most part correctly, as far as it goes, as a mental power for making present what is absent through the production of images. Several philosophical disputes are buried in this formulation, and some of these are addressed below. On the whole, however, there is broad agreement that through imagination we exercise a kind of sight for that not currently perceived, and we also visualize alternatives never before seen. The image of an absent loved one, of a treasured or a fabled landscape, of a misplaced heirloom, of a life not pursued—imagination invests absence with significance, but also clothes the present with meaning. Imagining at its most powerful is, I argue here, an interpretive act through which we, more than simply producing images, see things as this or that investment of meaning, as this or that means of transcending the present toward something else. Imagination, writes Mary Warnock, “enables us to see the world, whether present or absent, as significant, and also to present this vision to others, for them to share or reject” (1976: 196). Literature, taken casually to comprise poetry and narrative fiction, is one of our richest enactments of this imaginative vision. Both in its production and in the exercise it provides its readers for cultivating meaning-making imagining, literature advances seeing as .

Both poetry and narrative fiction are acts of creative imagination that stimulate the production of images and the interpretive recasting of what matters. Poetry accomplishes this perhaps more intensively through the evocation of dense imagery via the most economical uses of language, while fiction represents a more extensive mode of expression. The sometimes great investment of time required to read fictions contributes to their imaginative power to “spin a cocoon” around us and hold us within “a containing cosmos” while they do their work on us (Brann 1991 : 514). Works of literature generally, or their authors, rather, invite us to “see” things not present and to understand or value otherwise what is present before us by means of the extension of imaginative vision. When fictions bring us to see a character as of a type, to see a course of life as at odds with satisfaction, to see this world as a far cry from something better or worse—then imaginative literature complements, extends, or poses outright challenges to our conventional understanding. Imagination's power to make present what is absent positions it as a means of insight into but, even more significantly, as a source of challenge to the status quo of the “given” world before us. The role of imagination in literary production and reception makes literature a powerful source of pressure placed upon the real to be otherwise. This will lead us to conclusions regarding imagination in literature as a transgressive expression of freedom, regarding the ethical imperatives of imagining, and regarding imagining as the cultivation of a “double vision” (Brann 1991 ) that not merely shapes fictional worlds but also reshapes our own.

Imagining and Perceiving

We will make progress toward appreciating the role of imagining in literature if we first clarify the contrast between perception and imagination. The contrast highlights the distinctive features of acts of imagining and will guide us toward understanding the act of seeingas.

It has long been observed that imagining is voluntary, or subject to the will, in ways that perceiving is not. One can call up at will an image of home from across town, while one can only directly perceive its kitchen when standing in it. One can invite another to imagine something, but not to perceive something not available for the looking. Percepts are experienced as passively received, in contrast to our voluntary control over images. This contrast holds even if we reject a naive conception of perception as purely a matter of passive reception. Various post-Kantian epistemologies regard perception as an active process of categorization, and a Sellarsian rejection of the “myth of the Given” is a rejection of perception as pure reception of sense-data. But whatever goes into perception, the phenomenologies of perceiving and imagining differ regarding their voluntarism. When observing my desk, I do not choose to perceive a keyboard, even if I can choose what on the desk to attend to. Nor can I choose not to see the keyboard in front of me, except by closing my eyes so as not to perceive visually, or by looking the other way, in which case what I see when looking away is not up to me, either. Percepts “come at us” whether we like them or not, while images can be called up at will and recede as soon as we cease to imagine them. This contrast should not be overstated, however, because there are limits to how subject to willing imagining is (Brann 1991 : 159): one can try to call up an image of someone not seen for many years, but fail, and in some cases images come to us against our will or can be recalcitrant to receding once imaged. The contrast holds and is of vital importance nevertheless, because the voluntarism of imagining is, of course, what allows it to serve as a ready alternative to the annoying persistence of the perceived present before us.

The voluntarism contrast exposes several others between percepts and images. The aspects of an image are attention dependent—they cease to exist when one stops attending to them—whereas the details of percepts are there whether one attends to them or not (Mcginn 2004 : 26–29). When one imagines a favorite pet, the wagging tail wags only as long as one makes it so and exists as part of the image only as long as one wills it. The perceived pet's tail wags, if it does, whether one notices or not. Furthermore, percepts are constrained by the psychophysical structure of the visual field: they must be positioned in space in front of us (22–25). Percepts are situated wherever the eyes are directed, whereas images need not be fixed spatially at all. One can imagine a favorite pet riding in a car in another state, or sleeping in front of one, or standing behind one. Additionally, given the visual and spatial constraints on percepts, they are occlusive of each other, whereas images do not occlude percepts (32–34). One can freely imagine a favorite pet while looking at a computer screen, but one cannot perceive the wall behind the screen while perceiving the screen (without use of a mirror, at least, which will then occlude what lies behind it). Hence, images can be layered over objects “translucently” in ways that percepts cannot. This feature of imagining will prove central to understanding seeingas and its interpretive function.

Images and percepts also differ in what we learn from them. Being largely subject to the will, images are not informative in the way that percepts are, because images contain only what we put into them (Sartre 1991 : 11). Close observation of a favorite pet can reveal an infestation of fleas, but an imagined pet has fleas only if one chooses to imagine this; we don't learn anything about the pet by imagining it one way or another. As Wittgenstein puts it, “It is just because forming images is a voluntary activity that it does not instruct us about the external world” (1967: 110). The content of images is stipulated by our imagining, and so images have only as much content as we plug into them, whereas percepts are saturated with continuous content. “The object of perception,” writes Jean-Paul Sartre, “is constituted of an infinite multiplicity of determinations and possible relations. The most definite image, on the other hand, possesses in itself only a finite number of determinations, namely, only those of which we are conscious” (1991: 21). And because their content is stipulated, images do not require recognition. A favorite pet approaching from a distance has first to be recognized as such when the percept comes into focus, so to speak, but an image of a favorite pet approaching from a distance is just known already to be of the pet irrespective of the limits distance places on recognition (Mcginn 2004 : 25, 31). We do not come to discover things about our images, because we decided what they were to be when opting to imagine them.

These observations hammer another nail into the coffin of the outmoded “picture theory” of mental images. That theory holds that mental images assume the form of pictures in the mind that refer to what they picture by virtue of a resemblance between picture and object. But unlike mental images, actual perceived pictures can be highly informative regarding their objects, and they require recognition of what they are pictures of. “Images are not pictures,” Wittgenstein writes. “I do not tell what object I am imagining by the resemblance between it and the image” (1967: 109). There can be no question of what I imagine via a certain image, because each image intends its object directly via the voluntary act of imagining. There can, on the other hand, be a question concerning what a picture pictures, with an answer perhaps in some cases established partly by virtue of resemblances. Sartre, for one, took the intentionality of imagining to undermine not only the picture theory of mental images but even, at least at some points in his The Psychology of Imagination (1940), the very notion of mental imagery. On his view, imagination intends its object so directly as to dispense with the mediation of an image. “The imaginative consciousness I have of Peter,” Sartre writes, “is not a consciousness of the image of Peter: Peter is directly reached, my attention is not directed on an image, but on an object,” Peter himself (1991: 8). To imagine Peter from across town is to “see” Peter rather than an image of him. “There is no image in a consciousness which contains it,” Sartre adds (19). But this view is unable to make much metaphorical sense of how imagination “sees” what is absent; the view seems to reduce imagining simply to thinking of the absent object. Oddly, Sartre does not deny the existence of mental images, so their role in his theory is obscure. To some extent, his ambivalent conception of them is motivated by his commitment to a dubious theory of the transparency of consciousness (6). In any case, the fact that mental images intend their objects directly is sufficient to make consciousness of a mental image a consciousness of its object; we need not deny mental images a mediating role. The production of mental images gives imagination what it visualizes in the mind's eye. Such a conception of imagining can be sustained without suffering from the problems attached to the discredited picture theory of mental representation (for further discussion, see Brann 1991 ).

The fact that images do not inform as percepts can may suggest that imagining has no educative function. Were this correct, attributing to imagination a vital role in writing and reading literature would seem to derail the sorts of claims for literature that I began by proposing. But first of all, our imaginings surely are educative at least indirectly. The content of images, however stipulated, can remind us of features of objects or situations in ways that inform our judgments and behavior. Further, discovering what we are more or less able to imagine can teach us much about ourselves. More directly to the point, the contrasts described thus far between images and percepts have not shown the full range of what we do with images, and shortly we will see that images serve as powerful tools of interpretation when we engage in imaginative seeing-as. Such a use of imagery will be critical to the experience of literature, and it will secure a profound educative potential for the literary work. Images and texts will be partners in promoting interpretation not merely of the story but of the world. Their ready pairing reflects commonalities of their nature: percepts, as we saw, are saturated with continuous content, while the content of images is limited and stipulated. But much the same is true of fictions: their depictions are stipulated by the author, and even the richest depiction cannot approach the saturated continuity of perception. “The image is like a story in this respect,” McGinn writes: “it is constitutionally incomplete” ( 2004 : 25). Far from being a shortcoming, however, this incompleteness inherent to fictions invites the imaginative interpretations through which we fill out fictional worlds and, more important, through which we use fictions to reinterpret and reach new understandings of our own world.

A final contrast between images and percepts reflects my starting point for understanding imagination while also reinforcing the idea that it can yield understanding. Visual percepts, as we know, are of objects present to the visual system of the body, while images are of objects absent to perception. Imagination is a power for making present “to the mind's eye” objects or scenes currently unavailable for perception or even never to be seen. To imagine is to “see” something other than the humdrum present perceptible before us. This standard contrast prompted an observation by Wittgenstein about which I share McGinn's fascination: “While I am looking at an object I cannot imagine it” (1967: 109). Although Wittgenstein intends this remark to reveal differences in our language games regarding perceiving and imagining, rather than as a psychological claim, it does nevertheless seem empirically true. I can perceive a wheelbarrow before me; I can close my eyes or look away and call up an image of a wheelbarrow, but I cannot call up an image of the wheelbarrow before me while staring right at the real thing. It does seem, however, that I can, while perceiving a wheelbarrow, imagine another, or even this one, behind me. Hence the problem with perceiving and imagining the same thing at once hinges on the presence-absence contrast between percepts and images. But note that one can, while perceiving a wheelbarrow, also imagine it dancing the cancan in a live revue. Here, one “sees” the wheelbarrow as a dancer on stage, and this seeing of the object as something else is not constrained by the perceptual presence of the object in the way that merely calling up an image of the object is. Clearly, some more sophisticated act of imagining is at work in seeing-as, distinct from simply calling up an “uninflected” image of a thing. I turn now to elucidating this imaginative seeing, for this practice will prove central to the role of imagination in our responses to literary fictions.

Imagination and Seeing-As

Imaginative seeing, variously called “seeing-as” or “the seeing of aspects,” is explored famously by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations (1953) by means of the duck-rabbit picture and other devices. Seeing-as is there understood as an operation of imagination distinct from perception, but one that inflects perception when an image “invades” a percept and so motivates interpreting the percept as being or as representing or referring to something other than what it is. This requires some unpacking, first with regard to the distinctness of seeing-as from “basic” perception. “ ‘Seeing as,’ ” Wittgenstein writes, “is not part of perception. And for that reason it is like seeing and again not like” (1953: 197). It makes no sense, Wittgenstein thinks, “to say at the sight of a knife and fork ‘Now I am seeing this as a knife and fork.’ … One doesn't ‘ take ’ what one knows as the cutlery at a meal for cutlery” (195). The taking that Wittgenstein denies to perception is, of course, the take of interpretation. Similarly, some pages later Wittgenstein adds, “I cannot try to see a conventional picture of a lion as a lion, any more than an F as that letter” (206). One just sees a lion picture, or sees a lion “in” the picture, without having to interpret the picture as a picture of a lion. Seeing the lion picture for what it is, namely, a picture of a lion, requires the act of recognition typical of perception, but seeing it thus does not, Wittgenstein holds, require interpretation. Now, this is hardly a settled matter among philosophers of mind, hermeneuts, and philosophers of art. Some would argue in a Nietzschean vein that all experience is charged with quasiartistic interpretation, or at least that the comprehension of pictures requires interpretation of an image in light of artificial pictorial conventions. Others would hold, as intimated above, that any Kantian or post-Kantian commitment to the experiential unity of sensory passivity and categorizing spontaneity already entails understanding experience as such as an outcome of interpretation. But even if Wittgenstein were to agree that elaborate, creative, reality-determinative cognitive processes underlie the turning of sense data into the experience of a lion picture, or of an actual lion, he would reject the view that such processes entail seeing the sense data as a lion. We just see a lion, whereas seeing a lion picture, or an actual lion, as a symbol of royalty or as Bert Lahr in costume does involve an imaginative exercise of interpretation. Whether Wittgenstein is correct or not about the noninterpretive recognition of pictures, imaginative seeing is an interpretive act in ways that much perception is probably not, however active the process of perception is.

In seeing-as, Wittgenstein writes, “[i]t is as if an image came into contact, and for a time remained in contact, with the visual impression” (Wittgenstein 1953 : 207). To see a percept as something more or something else involves layering over the percept an image by means of which we “read” the percept in one direction or another and so see it differently, despite there being no change in the underlying percept. “The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception's being unchanged” (196). To see a lion as Bert Lahr in costume is to undergo a change of perception, via the imaginative significances one has layered over the percept, even as the initial object of perception has not altered. The lion remains the lion it was, but layers of imagery have altered its meaning for a time. Wittgenstein illustrates this both with the duck-rabbit drawing (194) and with a triangular figure seen in various aspects. One might be shown the duck-rabbit and only ever see a duck; in such a case, one does not see the picture as a duck picture, one just sees a picture of a duck. But by prompting or otherwise, it may dawn on one that the picture can instead be seen as a rabbit picture. While seeing the picture as a rabbit picture, one's perception alters as imagination reinterprets it as a rabbit picture, even though in one sense one sees the same old perception all along. Similarly, a figure of a right triangle with hypotenuse facing and parallel to the bottom of the page can be seen as “a triangular hole, as a solid, as a geometrical drawing; as standing on its base …; as a mountain …, as an overturned object which is meant to stand on the shorter side of the right angle,” and so on (Wittgenstein 1953 : 200). While it is possible always to see only a duck in the duck-rabbit picture, seeing the triangle as any of these things takes an effort: “[To] take the bare triangular figure for the picture of an object that has fallen over … demands imagination ” (207).

If imaginative seeing deploys images as an interpretive supplement to perception, we should be able to specify seeing-as further via the differentia between percepts and images discussed above (see Mcginn 2004 : 50–53). Imagining is largely subject to the will, whereas perception is not voluntary. Seeing-as, oddly positioned between the two, is a voluntary act of interpreting perception by means of images. It does not alter the underlying involuntary percept, even while seeing-as alters what we see by investing what is seen with fresh meanings. Images are attention dependent, whereas percepts are not, so what a percept is seen as imaginatively shares the transience of the image: the lion seen as Bert Lahr is altered only for as long as this interpretive attention is paid. Percepts are saturated with continuous content, unlike images, so what the percept is seen as does not appear to us with the saturation of full perception. Seeing a lion as Bert Lahr will be rich with lion perception, but not with the content of actually perceiving Bert Lahr in costume. Again, images, unlike percepts, do not require recognition, because their content is stipulated, so percepts can be misrecognized, but not what we see them as, since we supply the interpretation. Further, because percepts occlude one another but images do not occlude percepts, the images that layer over percepts when we see imaginatively add interpretively to the percept without occluding it. We still see the lion, but we see it as Bert Lahr.

I want to focus more carefully on the remaining contrasts between images and percepts: spatial specificity, presence-absence, and relative informativeness, because it is in these respects that the power and importance of imaginative seeing become clear. Percepts are spatially positioned in front of us, with the consequence that what we see them as imaginatively, when we layer an image over the percept, is seen as if before us. To see a perceived lion as Bert Lahr is to see the lion in front of you as Bert Lahr in costume; it is as if Bert Lahr were before you, costumed as the Cowardly Lion. This observation clearly entails a variation in imaginative seeing regarding the presence-absence contrast between percepts and images: the perceived lion is present to the visual system, and what this percept is seen as is presented to us imaginatively as if present, even though what the percept is seen as is itself absent. The key point is that seeing-as involves the “quasi presence” of an imagined object parasitical on the true presence of the object on which one lavishes images. That is, imaginative seeing is a seeing of the object via an interpretive layer of imagery, rather than merely an imaging in the mind apart from what we see before us. Put simply, to see imaginatively is to see the object , or the world, differently, as if other than it is. (Note that this conclusion vindicates Sartre's view of the object-oriented intentionality of imagining, though at the level of seeing-as rather than in the mere calling up of images.) To see imaginatively is at once to see and to interpret something in the world. I argue below that the experience of literature relies upon and promotes an imaginative seeing that is transformative, for a time, of the world before us.

We saw above that images do not exactly share the informativeness of percepts. We learn new things from perception in ways we evidently do not from imagining, especially because the content of images is voluntarily stipulated. Does this mean we have little to learn from seeing-as? Quite the contrary. Seeing-as serves an educative and reflective function in between the involuntary observational content of perception and the voluntary production of images, precisely because when seeing-as layers images onto the perceived world, it accomplishes an investment of meanings into the world. It transforms worldly things at the level of their significance for us, and it does so in the world, not merely in our heads. Warnock conveys this eloquently: “Imagination is our means of interpreting the world, and it is also our means of forming images in the world. The images themselves are not separate from our interpretations of the world; they are our way of thinking of the objects in the world” (1976: 194). Imaginative seeing lends a depth to experience that the mere saturation of the percept, however fascinating, cannot provide; seeing-as shows things to be or to mean more than they appear to perception. To practice imaginative seeing is to enact “the belief that there is more in our experience of the world than can possibly meet the unreflecting eye;” it is by virtue of creative seeing-as “that there is always more to an experience, and more in what we experience than we can predict” (202). But note that while the interpretive function of seeing-as enriches experience, it is also constrained by the world it interprets. Positioned between involuntary perception and voluntary imagining, seeing-as is answerable to the world that it layers over with its image construals. Percepts need to be amenable to specific choices of interpretation; otherwise, seeing-as devolves into idle fantasy. Indeed, fantasy in the pejorative sense, while one outcome of imagining, must be distinguished from the seeing-as that engages constructively with present realities. Imaginative seeing requires informed understanding of the world to make its interpretive recastings compelling or useful.

In sum, seeing-as creatively complicates the imagepercept contrast by bringing images into reinterpretive contact with perception. Unlike the simple imaging of something absent, seeing-as is not bound by the Wittgensteinian dictum that “while I am looking at an object I cannot imagine it.” While observing an object or the world, one can imagine it otherwise than it appears. One can see the object as something else or as invested with invisible significances. One can see the world other than it is, by the lights of unrealized possibility. To do so is not merely to fantasize some other world, but to see in this world its other potentials. Seeing-as is the power of imagination fully realized, remaking the world and hence granting us a freeing critical distance from the pressing present before us. Aided by imagination, this, too, is what literature does.

Interlude: Imagination and Romantic Genius

The two powers of imagination discussed above—the calling up of images and the more creative seeing-as reinterpretation of things—have a long history in Western discourses of imagining. That history has been studied in depth by many scholars (see, e.g., Engell 1981 ; Kearney 1988 ; Brann 1991 ); here I provide only a brief discussion of romantic theories of imagination as a means to summarize certain themes and to prepare for the remaining claims of this essay. Richard Kearney has identified historical paradigms of imagination, each informed by a different metaphor or figure of its power (1988: 17). The premodern mimetic paradigm for imagination employs the referential figure of a mirror capturing images of what we have seen. This reproductive capacity of imagination I outlined in the contrast between perceiving and imagining. The modern productive paradigm employs the expressive figure of imagination as a lamp casting a transforming light of creative rethinking on its objects. I have outlined this creativity in terms of imaginative seeing-as. (I do not address Kearney's third paradigm, the “parodic” imagination of postmodernism and its reflexive figure of a labyrinth of mirrors.)

We owe to Kant the most elaborate modern discrimination of the different reproductive and creatively productive powers of imagination. While reproductive imagination is largely limited to calling up the images of phenomena from past perception, Kant invests productive imagination with a range of roles crucial to cognition, aesthetic appreciation, and artistic creation. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) imagination mediates between sensation and understanding throughout the process of conceptualizing sense data into a coherent experiential structure (1998: 271–77). In the Critique of Judgment (1790) imagination is essential to the play of mental powers in which Kant thinks we feel the pleasure of finding something beautiful. Moreover, productive imagination is the guiding power of artistic genius: its “aesthetic ideas” (for Kant, the expressed content of works of art) create “another nature, out of the material which the real one gives” (2000: 192). In artistic genius, imagination “steps beyond nature” (192) by producing a perspective on or interpretation of things that supplements perception with fresh possibilities of significance, as we have seen in the act of seeing-as (see Pillow 2000 ).

Deeply influenced not only by Kant but by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling, the romantic poets William Wordsworth and especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge made the modern contrasts among imaginative powers central to their conception of poetic creation. In his Biographia Literaria (1817) Coleridge distinguished what he calls “fancy,” or the mere associative reproduction of images without any unifying structure, from imagination proper (1985: 305). This pejorative fancy is the idle passing of trains of imagery to no purpose but diversion. He divides true imagination into primary and secondary forms corresponding, roughly, to the cognitive versus the aesthetic/artistic powers that Kant had characterized. Coleridge's famous declaration is both fascinating and obscure:

The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime agent of all human Perception, and as a representation in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree , and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital , even as all objects ( as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (304)

Primary imagination functions along Kantian lines to imbue perception with conceptual richness. It is, for Coleridge, as James Engell writes, “the agency of perceiving and learning. It is the process of education in the original and general sense: a leading of the mind out into the world” (1981: 343). Secondary imagination, on the other hand, produces ordered structures of rich expression that transcend actual nature into a second nature of organic unity and balance. Coleridge coined the term “esemplastic,” drawing on Greek roots, to characterize the power of imagination to “fashion into one” disparate materials ordered for the purpose of conveying something new (Brann 1991 : 508). In his poetry, along with Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads (1798) and elsewhere, Coleridge sought uses of language expressive of a quasidivine power of imaginative unification.

Throughout its history, from Aristotle onward, imagination has been pressed into the role of mediating between the bodily senses and the rational intellect. Kant's theory of imagination in his epistemology and aesthetics culminates that tradition and grants profound importance to imagining as an agent of cognition and feeling. His theory of artistic genius, and its adoption by the romantic poets and later thinkers, tends, however, to isolate imaginative creativity in a hallowed hall of great and original minds. For Kant, genius is a rare gift of nature more remarkable even than the scientific talents of a Newton (2000: 187). The consequent romantic cult of original genius should be resisted, I believe, for the imaginative seeing characterized above is not the exceptional practice of a gifted few but is instead ubiquitous in the sensemaking practices of interpretive human beings. Acts of seeing-as thoroughly mediate and meld perception and thought wherever we layer image over percept to imbue things and persons with unseen meanings. However correct Wittgenstein may have been that we do not see the cutlery at dinner as a knife and fork, we do see them as heirlooms of family tradition, as arranged on the table according to cultural tradition, as one among many cultures’ means of dining, as exemplars of a school of design, as embarrassing in their need of polishing, and so on. The imaginative seeing that I have associated with the modern Kantian conception of productive imagination accompanies our experience of the world constantly as an interpretive supplement to more or less all that we see. Artistic talent certainly lies in the organization and expression of emotions and ideas in various sensuous media, and few may be the great poets and artists capable of profound expression in those media. But we are all geniuses of seeing things, through the lens of imagination, as something more or something other than they appear.

The Romantic notion of genius is distinctive of the modern period's emphasis on the individual subject as cognitive agent, aesthetic judge, and political unit. While the capacities of imagining discussed above are hardly unique to the modern subject, they come in modernity to be symbolic of that subject's creative autonomy (about which more below). It takes a culture of individualism to make how each of us differently interprets the world something of defining interest: imaginative seeing-as, it appears, is seen as definitive of the modern self. It perhaps takes that same culture to make the personalities, emotions, choices, and fates of fictional characters maximally of interest, so there is little wonder that modern individualism set the stage for the rise of the novel as an artistic form. The novel's “extensive” mode of expression, the investments of time its appreciation can require, reflects cultural convictions about the fascination of individual lives and what strikes us as a pleasurable use of politically and economically secured leisure. The modern individual is one primed and prompted to make full cognitive and aesthetic use of imagination's seeing-as powers. The endless narrative fictionalizing of modern life is among the richest expressions of this life of imagination.

Imagination and Literature

In a remark pregnant with significance, Wittgenstein observes in Philosophical Investigations that he can see something “in various aspects according to the fiction I surround it with” (1953: 210). To see imaginatively is to clothe something in a fiction that transforms its meaning. This fiction may take the simple form of an image that reinterprets a picture of a lion. It may take the more complex form of a system of images evoked by the language of a poem. Or it may take the form of a fiction proper: an extended narrative relating characters and events, inviting sequences of visualization on the part of the reader, whose imaginative response to the fiction is a kind of seeing and interpreting at once. Reading literature is a process of transforming language into visions, and this process puts imagination as a power of visualization into creative cooperation with language. I noted above that both images and fictions are incomplete: the stipulated content of images falls short of the saturated content of perception; what is described and narrated in a fiction leaves unspecified all manner of details that would be present to perception were the story instead an experience. However profound the power of language to describe events and invite their visualization, language “can never achieve fully determined visibility” (Brann 1991 : 473). Neither can imagining, whose products supplement rather than replace perception. Brought into collaboration in the response to literature, visualization and narrative in words take advantage of their similar incompleteness to spark an imaginative seeing in which the stipulation of images by the reader is both encouraged to fill in missing detail and guided by the constraints the narrative poses. “[We] respond appropriately to the statements of fiction,” David Novitz argues, “only if we respond imaginatively—that is, [if we] respond by imagining the situations or lives of its fictional characters in terms closely specified by the author” (1987: 81; see also Walton 1990 ). Just as seeing-as is answerable to perception, the fiction's terms direct our imagining. Even so, the incompleteness of description also frees imagination to visualize well beyond what the language conveys, however short of the saturation of perception its images will remain.

Studies of childhood language acquisition suggest that the development of language skills is closely related to the capacity for imaginative play. Much play entails the acting out of story lines, and playing a tea party or a moon launch requires exiting reality sufficiently to enter into a nonpresent imaginative state of affairs. Paul Harris argues that the understanding and production of narratives, or what he calls “connected discourse,” “is only possible for a creature who is capable, temporarily, of setting current reality to one side and constructing a situation model pertaining to a different spatiotemporal locus” (2000: 194). The capacity to invent “situation models” in pretend play, Harris proposes, underpins the sophisticated uses of language in which children and adults describe non-current situations. That is, playing at a pretend moon launch prepares the language skills that underlie the ability to understand and describe an actual moon launch one has not witnessed directly. Harris misses the point, however, that the pretend tea party happens in the here and now, not in some other space or time. The hand not actually gloved in white lace, with curled pinky actually distended, is seen as sipping a cup of tea in the present world, not in some other. Seeing-as, we know, transforms things of this world through shifts of interpretation. The imaginative response to literature is a comparable mode of play in which, I propose, we envision our own world differently rather than escaping into some other.

Comprehending a fiction, like playing at tea, indeed requires setting aside, to a degree, current reality so as to envision another. What Colin McGinn calls “fictional immersion,” the experience of disappearing into an engrossing story, is made possible by an imagination capable of seeing an image system for a fictional world, sometimes with an intensity to rival perception, even though it never occludes perception (2004: 103). To become immersed in a fiction, we must be able to free ourselves sufficiently from the grip of present affairs, so that we can visualize a narrative of nonpresent events. Imagination makes possible this transcendence of the present, the visual projection of events happening elsewhere, and so our immersion into the story of that world. Now we have seen two principal capacities of imagination: the power to call up images of things absent to perception, and the power to reinterpret things through the layering of images over percepts. Both acts of imagination enrich our response to literature. We visualize the story world through sequences of imagery that fill out its absence. These images hover before the mind's eye and take us out of the humdrum present. This response to literature is an imaginative mode of play akin to fantasy, where fantasy is understood as a hermetically sealed interlude apart from real life, an escapist diversion from reality. Such fantasy has its pleasures as well as its limit of value, for we have seen that the second power of imagining, to see things as other or more than they appear, sustains an “eminent contact with real and daily life” (Brann 1991 : 561) that fantasy does not. Full imaginative seeing construes this world creatively and invests its objects and scenes with fresh meanings. Imagination enlivens the fictional narrative not merely via the imaging of a fictional world; its more profound service to literature is to bring the fiction to bear on this world through the interpretive work of seeing-as. The things and situations represented in works of literature are intended by acts of imagining directed at this world: they have “substance” not merely in a fantastical space immanent to imagination, but are “intended as external to the imaginer, as imaginations projected into the world” (Brann 1991 : 449). When imagination not only “sees” what is absent but also reinterprets what is present, when imagination sees this world as another, or another world in the potentials of this one, it fully serves the interests of literature. Works of poetry and narrative fiction, far from merely calling up isolated sequences of imagery cut off from the pressing real, are fundamentally about the present world over which their images and stories layer. They invite the imaginative seeing of this world otherwise than it is.

This general claim can be further specified in terms of a central device both of imaginative seeing and of literary creativity: the use of metaphor. McGinn calls “cognitive imagination” the entertaining of a proposition, or imagining that p, as opposed to the layering of images in seeing-as (2004: 128). Borrowing his example, when one imaginatively sees the sky as oceanic, percept (sky) and image (ocean) merge into a new perception of the sky under an aspect of watery blue vastness and depth. When one entertains the proposition that the sky is oceanic, McGinn proposes, image and belief merge into metaphorical understanding (134–35). These are really sides of the same coin: the imaginative layering of image over percept inspires the metaphorical cognition of one thing as another, and the metaphor expressed in language enlivens imagination's capacity to see the sky as oceanic. Metaphor is essentially the linguistic expression of seeing-as, imaginative seeing pursued in words rather than images. Metaphor distills into language the seeing of one thing in another such that, when successful, it inspires creative seeing-as on the part of its hearer or reader. Now, various philosophers have argued that the structure of works of art, whether linguistic or not, is fundamentally metaphorical (see Hausman 1989 ): a work functions as a system of metaphors that recast our understanding of something by motivating us to see it not as it is but otherwise. Works of literature often make elaborate use of metaphor internally and invite us to understand characters or events in metaphorical terms or as metaphors for this or that. The larger claim, though, is that the target domain for literary metaphor is the reader's own world. A fiction reshapes our thinking about this world by inviting us to see it under the aspect of an imagined variation or alternative. To take in a fictional narrative is to layer it over the world present before us as a metaphor exposing just how this world is, or as a metaphor for how else, for better or worse, this world might be. Wittgenstein provides the perfect metaphor for the seeing-as that literature prompts: it is “the echo of a thought in sight” (1953: 212). Imagination serves literature by aiding our seeing, both literally and figuratively, and by understanding the world differently through the metaphorical lenses that fictions provide.

The creative flexibility to see one thing as another, to see one thing in another, is intimately linked to the empathic power to see oneself as another, to see in another life the joys and pains possible in one's own. Our responses to works of fiction are often deeply emotional, and while those responses may range across joy, anger, disgust, and admiration, our emotional investment in fictions is secured fundamentally through empathy. Imaginative seeing makes the empathic relation to fictional characters possible. To care about the life and fate of a fictional character is to imagine that life or fate as one's own. “It is only when one responds imaginatively,” Novitz writes, “by ‘thinking one's way into’ the situation of [Anna Karenina] … that one can acquire beliefs about Anna which allow us to feel the urgency, dread, and hopelessness of her situation” (1987: 86; see also Cohen 1999 ). The empathic power of imagination is accomplished precisely through the imaginative seeing I have emphasized: we see our own lives transformed as into another by metaphorically living out the days and troubles of fictional characters. We have seen that imagining is largely subject to the will, and we know too well that emotion usually is not. Yet the voluntarism of imagination plays a powerful role in helping us “summon emotions and feelings not only as spontaneous accompaniments but even, to some degree, as intentional effects” (Brann 1991 : 764). Imagination mediates between the will and the passions, summoning emotions usually out of our hands to concoct; works of poetry and narrative fiction are among the richest means of providing such deliberate exercises of emotional depth. Imagination enriches emotional responses to fiction, but it also informs more broadly the tenor of our desires and what it means when they go unfulfilled. Both imagination and desire are defined, after all, in terms of the absence of their object, though imagination can sometimes partially satisfy desire by making virtually present the absent thing or one desired (Brann 1991 : 762)—hence the great appeal of the love story to many of those desiring love.

Imagination and Human Freedom

Imagination allows us to make present through images what is absent from the present world before us. It allows us to reconfigure that world through the image-layering interpretive practice of seeing-as. And in literature, imagination richly realizes its capacity to revise the present world by layering a transfiguring other world over it. In a tradition made gospel by Sartre, these powers identify imagination as a principal source of human freedom. A creature devoid of freedom would be one utterly beholden to the determinacy of the present, unable in any way to escape the clutches of what is the case in each successive moment. The mental horizon of a being without freedom would not extend beyond what is before it. But by making present what is absent, imagination regularly transcends what is the case at present to envision other places, times, and possibilities. By doing so, imagination regularly enacts our free transcendence of present determinacy toward something else. “To posit an image,” writes Sartre, “is to construct an object on the fringe of the whole of reality, which therefore means to hold the real at a distance, to free oneself from it, in a word, to deny it” (1991: 266). The voluntarism earlier attributed to imagining, the fact that the calling up of images is largely subject to the will, Sartre understands as definitive of human consciousness as an experience of freedom from present conditions. “For a consciousness to be able to imagine,” he writes, “it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able by its own efforts to withdraw from the world. In a word it must be free” (267). Consciousness as such is for Sartre an act of setting itself apart from the world, of negating the world through awareness of it; hence, he as much as holds that consciousness is inconceivable without the power and freedom to imagine. At the everyday level, imagination enacts our freedom because the images we call up of absent objects, scenes, or persons open consciousness out into futures of possibility, inform our judgments about better and worse options, and spur us to action.

Sartre emphasizes that however much consciousness negates the present world in apprehending it as not-itself, imagination's freeing production of images always occurs from a determinate perspective on that world:

[E]very apprehension of the real as a world tends of its own accord to end up with the production of unreal objects because it is always, in one sense, a free negation of the world and that always from a particular point of view …. [An] image, being a negation of the world from a particular point of view, can never appear excepting on the foundation of the world and in connection with the foundation. (1991: 269)

Our experience of the world is regularly accompanied by imagery of the unreal or the not-present because conscious experience itself negates the fixity of the real and frees imagination to see what is absent or otherwise, what is not real now or yet. But such imaginings always arise from and reflect the subject's place in the world. They have as their backdrop the definite circumstances of the individual consciousness and its awareness not just of any world but of the facticity of this one. This point applies not only to the calling up of images of what is absent, but also to the imaginative seeing in which we reinterpret the world through the layering of images over what is present. Seeing-as is responsive to the definite present; it reinterprets not some fantasy world but the constraining reality of given circumstance. (I take this to be true of many works of fantasy literature; seeing the present world imaginatively does not require a commitment to literary realism or naturalism.) Through its recasting of things of this world, it expresses our freedom to transgress against current understandings of things, while also acknowledging the hold this world has on our points of view. Seeing-as is a worldly act that, while enacting a power to interpret freely and creatively, does not free us of being in the world.

Authors of works of literature attempt the kind of free self-making, the creative shaping of a world that the Greeks called poiesis . Poietic works are self-fashioning because, as Richard Eldridge writes, they “are representations of subjects, their characters, their interests, and their possible stances in culture that are made by subjects and that in turn help to make them, insofar as they make available certain routes of self-construal and of action and identity in culture” (1996: 7). Poietic works are expressions of freedom because their production shows that we are “able to articulate and envision, albeit in specific ways, impersonal ideals of free activity and ways of pursuing them” (10–11). They are never creations ex nihilo , for they are made from given materials and reflect the situated facticity of the creative subject. But they demonstrate our capacity to transcend determinacy toward fresh possibility. Eva Brann summarizes three aspects of imaginative freedom: “freedom from the compulsions of the present, the freedom to control imaginative vision, and the freedom to show physical competence” (1991: 186). This last is of great importance. It refers in broad strokes to all of our capacities to externalize imaginative products within shareable media of expression, to use physical, mental, and emotional labor to communicate creatively with each other. Not all products of imaginative fancy achieve such communication. A centuries-old tradition associates imagining with madness (see Pillow 2000 ), especially where imagination devolves into escapist and incommunicable fantasy or delusion. This tradition shows through in the psychologist's alternate definition of poiesis recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary : “the coining of neologisms, especially by a schizophrenic.” To create poietically is to stretch out past given patterns of intelligibility in order freely to express something else and, as such, carries with it the risk of producing non-sense along with the potential for real revelation.

As the truism states, with freedom comes responsibility. The free exercise of imaginative seeing, in both the production and appreciation of literature, entails ethical obligations that raise imagining above escapist play. We have already observed the role of imagination in empathy: our capacity to don the clothes of another's life substantiates our obligation to care about the joys and sufferings of others. Kearney has identified two other ethical functions of imagination: the testimonial and the utopian (1991: 225). Complementary to the more evidentiary practices of historiography, imaginative storytelling records affectively rich testimony about human choices and forms of life. It compels the self-examination that comes from seeing oneself portrayed in an unsavory fictional character, and it exercises our recognition of what should count as worthy lives. The utopian function is really poetical and ethical at once: poiesis enacts the imperative constantly to reimagine the world in hopes of something more, for the sake simply of creative transcendence of the present, for the sake of fashioning “products of imaginative power calling to ways of cultural life not yet in being” (Eldridge 1996 : 8). But this self-making creativity must be ethically centered in an imaginative seeing that seeks to improve the human condition. The utopian obligation of storytelling does not require a Utopia of every fictional narrative. It does require at least the effort to affect incremental improvement of the human person through the depiction of better and worse choices. It requires depicting the consequences of the presence or absence of kindness, and it requires depicting the courage to achieve, or the cowardice of avoiding, a fresh imaginative vision.

However much it expresses the point of view of the artist from and on his or her foundation in the given world, a work of art is a kind of realized unreality expressed in transgression of that world. While realized in tangible media, the unreality of a poem or a novel lies in its counterpoint to the present world, its challenge to see that world from a critical distance or to see to the world's evolution toward something else. The imaginative seeing that works of literature encourage is fundamentally an act of transgression against the current state of affairs. The “production of unreal objects” that Sartre associated with consciousness of a world poses a continual challenge to the stasis of the status quo. Imagination is our principal means of putting pressure on the real to become unreal. We accomplish this imaginatively by replacing the real with a real perceived otherwise through the lens of seeing-as. When imaginative seeing reinterprets the world before us through its layers of images, it becomes conceivable that the world could or should be otherwise. “The possible's slow fuse,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “is lit by the imagination” (quoted in Kearney 1988 : 370). There is violence in Dickinson's metaphor: imagination lights a fuse to explode the actual so that it may be replaced by the newly possible. But in a sense, this is simply what happens inevitably in the passage of every moment: the possible perpetually replaces the actual with successive actualities as each actuality fades into the past. Indeed, on a Kantian conception of imagination's role in cognition, imagination is responsible for “schematizing” temporally the basic categories through which we structure experience (Kant 1998 : 271–77). Imagination puts those categories into time so that they can bear on the passing manifold of sensory input. If, in artistic creation and in seeing-as, imagination lights the fuse of transformative possibility, its role is really to accelerate the pace of change in which it already has a cognitive part.

The distance from the present that our capacity for imagining makes possible, the seeing of present things as something more or something else, and the freedom of self-making embodied therein, all make imagination's sight a critical one, one not beholden to the given state of things. In this respect, as John Whale observes, “imagination is an inescapable and essential element in cultural critique” (2000: 196). Imagination serves literature by affording it the power to intervene sometimes mightily in critical reflection on ourselves. Imagining may generally embody a critical distancing from what is present, but its use especially in the production and reception of works of poetry and narrative fiction can bring its freeing glance of alternative vision to bear fully on transforming the present. My claim has been that imagination works in the service of literature by inviting the seeing-as interpretive play through which poems and fictions call us to revise our understandings of things. My claim may as well have been that works of literature, or their authors, serve imagination by providing the incendiary fuel to make its contrary vision shine most brightly.

Imagination as Double Vision

Brann has eloquently summarized the contributions that imagination makes to enriching our lives. Imagining, she writes, “serves our worldly existence by pulling us out of its dumb immediacy, distancing us from an oppressively close present and disqualifying the primacy of the merely real here and now, while according actuality to the absent and the nonexistent” (1991: 798). While Brann does not refer to literature in this passage, my claim has been that imagination and works of literature partner intimately in this enrichment. What she describes imagining as accomplishing for us, literature does, as well. This commonality is not just a happy coincidence but is rather a consequence of the vital role imagination plays in bringing alive the words on the pages of books of poetry and narrative fiction (not to mention the role it plays in getting the words on the page in the first place). Imagination brings words alive by filling in language with imagery responsive to the text but expansive of its significance for us. Imagining accomplishes this by visualizing objects and scenes in the mind's eye, but it enlivens language more profoundly by seeing the world differently, interpreting the world anew through the lens of imaginative seeing-as. At the height of its powers, “the world-revising, world-emending imagination,” Brann writes, “projects an inner world onto the external environment and elicits a second appearance from the visible world” (1991: 774). Layering imagination over perception in seeing-as helps us to see more, or other possibilities, than are evident to the perceiving eye. We engage in such creative and interpretive sight when we make sense of the world through metaphor, for example, but we arguably see most imaginatively when works of literature revise our perceptions so as to reveal the world otherwise than customary habits of thought and perception permit. The visual and emotional intensity of the poem and the character exploration and narrative complexity of the novel are efforts of imaginative seeing that, if successful, “elicit a second appearance from the visible world” (Brann 1991 : 774). Imagination makes this possible through its powers of visualization, its mediating role with the passions, its interpretive finesse, and above all, its capacity to free us from the pressing present.

Brann calls imaginative seeing a power of “double vision” (1991: 774). In it we continue to perceive the world before us, but that world takes on a different light. We see the contrast between what is the case and the alternate possibilities or meanings that the interpretive layering of images reveals. We see the world doubly: as it is and as something else. Seeing double can be a dizzying experience, and works of literature at their most powerful do make us dizzy with imaginative possibility. The double vision of one thing as another in seeing-as, invited of us richly in poetry and narrative fiction, warrants careful navigation around Wittgenstein's slippery remark: “While I am looking at an object I cannot imagine it.” Though literally true with regard to the simple calling up of images, the statement is mistaken with regard to seeing-as. At the figurative level of imaginative seeing, I can imagine an object otherwise while looking at it; I can through image and metaphor transform its significance. This capacity to see otherwise is the freedom of creative transformation that imagining embodies. Works of literature are some of the denser structures of metaphor by means of which we undertake such transformation. They and imagination in concert provide lenses for double vision.

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Kearney, R. ( 1988 ). The Wake of Imagination . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. ( 1991 ). Poetics of Imagining . London: Harper Collins.

Mcginn, C. ( 2004 ). Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Novitz, D. ( 1987 ). Knowledge, Fiction and Imagination . Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Pillow, K. ( 2000 ). Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Sartre, J.-p. ( 1991 ). The Psychology of Imagination . New York: Carol. (Original work published in 1940.)

Walton, K. ( 1990 ). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Warnock, M. ( 1976 ). Imagination . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Whale, J. ( 2000 ). Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics and Utility . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. ( 1953 ). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, trans.). New York: Macmillan.

———. ( 1967 ). Zettel (G. E. M. Anscombe, trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Essay on Imagination And Creativity

Students are often asked to write an essay on Imagination And Creativity in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Imagination And Creativity

Understanding imagination.

Imagination is the mind’s ability to form images and ideas of things that are not present or real. It’s like a movie screen in your head where you can picture anything. For example, you can imagine what it’s like to fly like a bird or live on the moon. Imagination can take you anywhere!

The Power of Creativity

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. It involves thinking, then producing. If you have ideas, but don’t act on them, you are imaginative but not creative. For example, you may think of a new way to tie your shoes. That’s creativity!

Link Between Imagination and Creativity

Imagination and creativity are like best friends. Imagination gives you the idea, and creativity helps you make it real. For example, an artist first imagines a picture in their mind, then uses creativity to paint it. Both are needed to create something new.

Importance of Imagination and Creativity

Imagination and creativity are very important. They help us solve problems, make new things, and have fun! They can also help us understand others better. For example, if you can imagine how someone else feels, you can be kinder to them.

250 Words Essay on Imagination And Creativity

Imagination is a powerful tool in our minds. It lets us think of things that are not real or have not happened yet. For example, a child might imagine they are a superhero flying in the sky. This is not real, but the child can see it in their mind.

Creativity, on the other hand, is using our imagination to make something new. This could be a drawing, a story, or even a new way of doing something. For instance, if a child imagines a new type of car, and then draws it, that’s creativity!

The Link Between Imagination and Creativity

Imagination and creativity are closely linked. You need imagination to think of new ideas. And you need creativity to bring these ideas to life. So, imagination is like the seed of an idea, and creativity is like the water and sunlight that makes it grow.

Why Imagination and Creativity are Important

Imagination and creativity are important because they help us solve problems, invent new things, and make life more interesting. For example, if you imagine a way to make your school bag lighter, and then create a solution, you’ve used both imagination and creativity.

In conclusion, imagination and creativity are powerful tools that help us think of new ideas and bring them to life. They make life more interesting and help us solve problems. So, let’s keep imagining and creating!

500 Words Essay on Imagination And Creativity

Imagination is a powerful tool we all have. It is the ability to form new ideas, images, or concepts in our minds that are not present in our senses. We use our imagination every day, even when we dream. It allows us to explore beyond the boundaries of our physical world. For example, when we read a book, we imagine the characters and the places described in it.

What is Creativity?

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. It involves using our imagination to create unique ideas, artworks, solutions, and more. Creativity can be seen in many areas like art, science, and even in our daily life. For instance, creating a new recipe, designing a poster, or finding a new way to solve a math problem, all involve creativity.

Imagination and creativity are closely linked. Imagination is like the fuel, and creativity is the car. Without imagination, creativity would not exist. Imagination provides us with the ideas, and creativity helps us to turn these ideas into reality. For example, a writer first imagines a story in their mind before they create it on paper.

Imagination and creativity are very important in our lives. They help us solve problems, make discoveries, and create new things. They also make life more interesting and enjoyable. For example, when we’re bored, we can use our imagination to create a fun game or story.

Imagination and creativity also help us learn and grow. They encourage us to think outside the box and see things from different perspectives. This can help us understand new concepts and ideas more easily.

Boosting Imagination and Creativity

There are many ways to boost our imagination and creativity. Reading books, playing creative games, and exploring nature can stimulate our imagination. Engaging in creative activities like drawing, writing, or playing a musical instrument can enhance our creativity.

It’s also important to give ourselves time to relax and daydream. This can help our mind wander and come up with new ideas.

In conclusion, imagination and creativity are powerful tools that help us explore new ideas, solve problems, and make life more interesting. They are closely linked and depend on each other. By nurturing our imagination and creativity, we can enhance our ability to learn, grow, and make unique contributions to the world.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Journal of Educational Controversy

Home > Books, Journals, and other Publications > Peer-reviewed Journals > Journal of Educational Controversy > Vol. 5 > No. 1 (2010)

Article Title

Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change by Maxine Greene

Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon , University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN

Document Type

Book Review

How does imagination help us as inquirers? Assuming the value of imagination for inquiry, what should teachers and schools do to help encourage and further develop students' imaginative abilities? These are two questions I have been considering lately, and I have found two excellent sources to help me. I want to share them with you, the reader, first on an individual basis (as they are each worthy of their own review), then together to highlight their common bonds. Mary Catherine Bateson uses Peripheral Visions as an opportunity to reflect on her life and some of the key experiences she had that helped her learn to meet uncertainty through responsible improvision and to develop a habit of reflection. Maxine Greene also writes Releasing the Imagination as a series of essays reflecting on art that she has experienced through the years, especially literary art, which helped her learn to be wide-awake, open, and attending to the world around her.

Recommended Citation

Thayer-Bacon, Barbara J. (2010) "Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change by Maxine Greene," Journal of Educational Controversy : Vol. 5: No. 1, Article 24. Available at: https://cedar.wwu.edu/jec/vol5/iss1/24

Subjects - Topical (LCSH)

Education--Aims and objectives--United States; Education--Social aspects--United States; Educational change--United States; Arts--Study and teaching--United States

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Greene, Maxine

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United States

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Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America’s premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice. These wide-ranging essays address thinkers and topics from Gandhi and Martin Luther King on nonviolent resistance, to the dangers of identity politics, to the psychology of the heroes of classic American literature.

Bromwich demonstrates that moral imagination allows us to judge the right and wrong of actions apart from any benefit to ourselves, and he argues that this ability is an innate individual strength, rather than a socially conditioned habit. Political topics addressed here include Edmund Burke and Richard Price’s efforts to define patriotism in the first year of the French Revolution, Abraham Lincoln’s principled work of persuasion against slavery in the 1850s, the erosion of privacy in America under the influence of social media, and the use of euphemism to shade and anesthetize reactions to the global war on terror. Throughout, Bromwich considers the relationship between language and power, and the insights language may offer into the corruptions of power.

Moral Imagination captures the singular voice of one of the most forceful thinkers working in America today.

John N. Williams

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Guest Essay

The Problem With Saying ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’

A black and white photo of newborns in bassinets in the hospital.

By Alex Byrne and Carole K. Hooven

Mr. Byrne is a philosopher and the author of “Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions.” Ms. Hooven is an evolutionary biologist and the author of “T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us.”

As you may have noticed, “sex” is out, and “sex assigned at birth” is in. Instead of asking for a person’s sex, some medical and camp forms these days ask for “sex assigned at birth” or “assigned sex” (often in addition to gender identity). The American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association endorse this terminology; its use has also exploded in academic articles. The Cleveland Clinic’s online glossary of diseases and conditions tells us that the “inability to achieve or maintain an erection” is a symptom of sexual dysfunction, not in “males,” but in “people assigned male at birth.”

This trend began around a decade ago, part of an increasing emphasis in society on emotional comfort and insulation from offense — what some have called “ safetyism .” “Sex” is now often seen as a biased or insensitive word because it may fail to reflect how people identify themselves. One reason for the adoption of “assigned sex,” therefore, is that it supplies respectful euphemisms, softening what to some nonbinary and transgender people, among others, can feel like a harsh biological reality. Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” is taken to be an indirect and more polite way of communicating that the person is biologically female. The terminology can also function to signal solidarity with trans and nonbinary people, as well as convey the radical idea that our traditional understanding of sex is outdated.

The shift to “sex assigned at birth” may be well intentioned, but it is not progress. We are not against politeness or expressions of solidarity, but “sex assigned at birth” can confuse people and creates doubt about a biological fact when there shouldn’t be any. Nor is the phrase called for because our traditional understanding of sex needs correcting — it doesn’t.

This matters because sex matters. Sex is a fundamental biological feature with significant consequences for our species, so there are costs to encouraging misconceptions about it.

Sex matters for health, safety and social policy and interacts in complicated ways with culture. Women are nearly twice as likely as men to experience harmful side effects from drugs, a problem that may be ameliorated by reducing drug doses for females. Males, meanwhile, are more likely to die from Covid-19 and cancer, and commit the vast majority of homicides and sexual assaults . We aren’t suggesting that “assigned sex” will increase the death toll. However, terminology about important matters should be as clear as possible.

More generally, the interaction between sex and human culture is crucial to understanding psychological and physical differences between boys and girls, men and women. We cannot have such understanding unless we know what sex is, which means having the linguistic tools necessary to discuss it. The Associated Press cautions journalists that describing women as “female” may be objectionable because “it can be seen as emphasizing biology,” but sometimes biology is highly relevant. The heated debate about transgender women participating in female sports is an example ; whatever view one takes on the matter, biologically driven athletic differences between the sexes are real.

When influential organizations and individuals promote “sex assigned at birth,” they are encouraging a culture in which citizens can be shamed for using words like “sex,” “male” and “female” that are familiar to everyone in society, as well as necessary to discuss the implications of sex. This is not the usual kind of censoriousness, which discourages the public endorsement of certain opinions. It is more subtle, repressing the very vocabulary needed to discuss the opinions in the first place.

A proponent of the new language may object, arguing that sex is not being avoided, but merely addressed and described with greater empathy. The introduction of euphemisms to ease uncomfortable associations with old words happens all the time — for instance “plus sized” as a replacement for “overweight.” Admittedly, the effects may be short-lived , because euphemisms themselves often become offensive, and indeed “larger-bodied” is now often preferred to “plus sized.” But what’s the harm? No one gets confused, and the euphemisms allow us to express extra sensitivity. Some see “sex assigned at birth” in the same positive light: It’s a way of talking about sex that is gender-affirming and inclusive .

The problem is that “sex assigned at birth”— unlike “larger-bodied”— is very misleading. Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” suggests that the person’s sex is at best a matter of educated guesswork. “Assigned” can connote arbitrariness — as in “assigned classroom seating” — and so “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer.

Contrary to what we might assume, avoiding “sex” doesn’t serve the cause of inclusivity: not speaking plainly about males and females is patronizing. We sometimes sugarcoat the biological facts for children, but competent adults deserve straight talk. Nor are circumlocutions needed to secure personal protections and rights, including transgender rights. In the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020, which outlawed workplace discrimination against gay and transgender people, Justice Neil Gorsuch used “sex,” not “sex assigned at birth.”

A more radical proponent of “assigned sex” will object that the very idea of sex as a biological fact is suspect. According to this view — associated with the French philosopher Michel Foucault and, more recently, the American philosopher Judith Butler — sex is somehow a cultural production, the result of labeling babies male or female. “Sex assigned at birth” should therefore be preferred over “sex,” not because it is more polite, but because it is more accurate.

This position tacitly assumes that humans are exempt from the natural order. If only! Alas, we are animals. Sexed organisms were present on Earth at least a billion years ago, and males and females would have been around even if humans had never evolved. Sex is not in any sense the result of linguistic ceremonies in the delivery room or other cultural practices. Lonesome George, the long-lived Galápagos giant tortoise , was male. He was not assigned male at birth — or rather, in George’s case, at hatching. A baby abandoned at birth may not have been assigned male or female by anyone, yet the baby still has a sex. Despite the confusion sown by some scholars, we can be confident that the sex binary is not a human invention.

Another downside of “assigned sex” is that it biases the conversation away from established biological facts and infuses it with a sociopolitical agenda, which only serves to intensify social and political divisions. We need shared language that can help us clearly state opinions and develop the best policies on medical, social and legal issues. That shared language is the starting point for mutual understanding and democratic deliberation, even if strong disagreement remains.

What can be done? The ascendance of “sex assigned at birth” is not an example of unhurried and organic linguistic change. As recently as 2012 The New York Times reported on the new fashion for gender-reveal parties, “during which expectant parents share the moment they discover their baby’s sex.” In the intervening decade, sex has gone from being “discovered” to “assigned” because so many authorities insisted on the new usage. In the face of organic change, resistance is usually futile. Fortunately, a trend that is imposed top-down is often easier to reverse.

Admittedly, no one individual, or even a small group, can turn the lumbering ship of English around. But if professional organizations change their style guides and glossaries, we can expect that their members will largely follow suit. And organizations in turn respond to lobbying from their members. Journalists, medical professionals, academics and others have the collective power to restore language that more faithfully reflects reality. We will have to wait for them to do that.

Meanwhile, we can each apply Strunk and White’s famous advice in “The Elements of Style” to “sex assigned at birth”: omit needless words.

Alex Byrne is a professor of philosophy at M.I.T. and the author of “Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions.” Carole K. Hooven is an evolutionary biologist, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, an associate in the Harvard psychology department, and the author of “T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

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Essay on Imagination
Simply, Imagination is the ability of an individual to think of what could be, could've been and what could never be. It is the ability of our brain to present scenarios based on our train of thought. Technically speaking, Creativity stems from our accessing the prefrontal cortex. Any idea we have, any thought that constructs a scenario ...
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This way of writing is really useful when we need to write narrative and imaginative essays for tests or just for practice. In this chapter, we're going to talk about the important parts of creative writing, the kinds of questions you might see on tests, and how the things you learn in non-fiction writing can help you write amazing stories. 1.
How to write an Imaginative Essay?
It is a form of creative writing that can be used in literature, poetry, and other forms of writing as well. 20 Topics/Prompts for Imaginative Essay. Write an Imaginative Essay - 'Imagine you were a character in a novel and describe your journey.'. Write an Imaginative Essay - Imagine you were a superhero and describe your powers and ...
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Imagination is the canvas upon which writers paint their stories. It's the ability to conjure vivid images, emotions, and scenarios in our minds, transcending the limits of reality. In the realm of creative writing, imagination serves as the foundation for storytelling, allowing writers to transport readers to new dimensions and experiences.
Imagination
Acknowledgments. No one can have an encyclopedic knowledge on a topic as vast as imagination. The previous iteration of the entry could not have existed without the help of Paul Bloom, David Chalmers, Gregory Currie, Tyler Doggett, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Shaun Nichols, Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Jonathan Weinberg, Ed Zalta, an anonymous referee, and—most of all—Aaron Norby.
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Abstract. This chapter introduces the history of the concept of imagination within philosophy, the human sciences, and literary theory. It shows how imagination allows escape from ordinary life while also illuminating possibilities with which we can engage reality. While imagination has been revered for its expansion of human life and its ...
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The essay can be narrative or descriptive, but the use of imagination in the creation of sounds, visual details and evoking sensations and feelings makes it imaginative writing. What-If Essays This type of an essay topic invites the writer to imagine a situation that may or may not be possible, rational or realistic.
Steps for Imaginative Writing in Paragraph Essay Form
Normally, the extent of imagination will decide the depth of the essay. Steps To Write A Good Imaginative Story/Essay: STEP 1: Choose the Most Extravagant Imaginative Essay Topic. If there are various options to choose from, opt for writing on the "most extravagant" topic.
The Imagination In Frankenstein English Literature Essay
The imagination in Frankenstein is that Dr. Frankenstein created an eight foot tall monster out of miscellaneous body parts, turning mans greatest fear of death and turning it into life, trying to make a perfect man and the advancement of the human kind. As the quote "The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever ...
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Imagination is triggered in The Life and Adventure of Robinson Crusoe when Robinson sees a footprint on the sand. He feels insecure and starts to image things: "innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself" (Chapter 11, pg 87) Sometimes, he "fancied" the "devil". When he discovers the footprint ...
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The essays and reviews substantiate his reputation as an eloquent and authoritative critic across a wide range of literature, and as a keen judge of contemporary scholarship, while his reviews of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings will be of additional interest to scholars and students of fantasy.
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Imagination Real or Fake Essay (425 words) Imagination. Words: 425 (2 pages) The mind can create its own world rather than the other way about. William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelly, John Keats, and Robert Browning all display a certain power of imagination, in which the mind is capable of creating its own world.
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Imaginative Essay: An Imaginative Essay is an essay which tends to discuss anything from space travel to fantasy land. It is basically an essay based on fiction, where you are required to put your imaginary skills/thoughts in a logical order. Your imagination will decide the depth of your essay. It is completely dependent on your creative ...
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33 Imaginative Essay Topics and Fun Prompts » JournalBuddies.com
We have some excellent imaginative essay topics and writing ideas here. With fun prompts covering topics like field trips to the moon, talking to animals, and fairy-tale sequels, students will have all sorts of chances to let their imaginations—and their pencils—run wild. And, though you may have a few students who are natural-born writers ...
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Imagination and creativity are closely linked. Imagination is like the fuel, and creativity is the car. Without imagination, creativity would not exist. Imagination provides us with the ideas, and creativity helps us to turn these ideas into reality. For example, a writer first imagines a story in their mind before they create it on paper.
Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social
Mary Catherine Bateson uses Peripheral Visions as an opportunity to reflect on her life and some of the key experiences she had that helped her learn to meet uncertainty through responsible improvision and to develop a habit of reflection. Maxine Greene also writes Releasing the Imagination as a series of essays reflecting on art that she has ...
Moral Imagination: Essays
March 2014. 9781400850013. Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice.
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essay the power of imagination: its influence on an willingness to embrace or reject an uncertain future abstract: the human imagination is remarkable cognitive. ... Theory in English Studies (Engl 2202) 26 Documents. Students shared 26 documents in this course. University Mount Royal University. Academic year: 2023/2024.
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10 question spreadsheets are priced at just .39! Along with your finished paper, our essay writers provide detailed calculations or reasoning behind the answers so that you can attempt the task yourself in the future. Hire a Writer. Homework Assignment. Imagination Essay In English -.
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The Imagination In Frankenstein English Literature Essay
The importance of imagination in the romanticism period was all about establishing who you were as a writer. The imagination in Frankenstein is that Dr. Frankenstein created an eight foot tall monster out of miscellaneous body parts, turning mans greatest fear of death and turning it into life, trying to make a perfect man and the advancement of the human kind.
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How to write an Imaginative Essay? - The English Digest

Imagine you were a ghost and describe your afterlife.

If you were a traveler to a different planet, what would be your experience?

Imagine you were a detective and describe solving a mystery.

Imagine you were a dragon and describe your life in a cave.

Imagine you were a genie and describe your life in the lamp.

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Steps for Imaginative Writing in Paragraph Essay Form

Here are Some Instances of Imaginative Writing:

Extent Of An Imaginary Writing:

Steps To Write A Good Imaginative Story/Essay:

STEP 2: Start Writing an Imaginative Piece Only When You Are Highly Inspired.

STEP 3: Be Original

STEP 4: Avoid Indirect Speech in Your Imaginative Writing

STEP 5. Incorporate a Message

Step 6. Use of Figures of Speech in Imaginative Writing

STEP 7. Read Aloud and Revise

Salient Features of Imaginative Writing:

The Elements of Imaginative Writing and Its Importance

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