On the issue of Currie on impersonal imagining (post by Warren
Buckland): I have a problem with Currie's position on this and it can be
put by pointing to an example of impersonal imagining he offers in his
essay in Allen and Smith's book.
Currie writes there:
"The film viewer imagines Marion being attacked in the shower, but does
not imagine being there in the shower to share the experience." (p. 55)
Is this right? Couldn't one propose that one reason why women in
particular get frightened of showers after viewing Psycho is that we did
imagine being in the shower--not in the sense of imagining I was there
beside Marion and Norman sharing their experience, but in the sense of
somehow imagining that I am Marion in the shower being stabbed--after
all that knife is coming right at me (this is something that Murray
Smith seems to be trying to get at in his article in the same volume,
"Imagining from the Inside"--linking POV shots with types of imagining).
I am really not sure how one could decide anyway between whether I am
personally imagining myself being there and imagining impersonally
Marion having this experience. Is the answer to this question meant to
be derived from conceptual analysis or is this instead some sort of
empirical hypothesis? Much of what Currie writes suggests the latter,
but I am also not sure of how empirical tests can be done to determine
just what someone is imagining. Reports on it might well be
contaminated by theory (or by a poor conceptual framework?). Currie
does refer to someone doing research on this, an experimental
psychologist at Oxford, Paul Harris; but (a) Harris comes up with the
opposite conclusion to Currie!, and (b) it's hard to assess his
experiemental design from Currie's brief description (might be hard for
me to assess anyway, qua non-empirical philosophy type.
While I am on the subject of Currie, I will confess to another pet
peeve, namely, why does he place so much emphasis on studying autism as
a defect of or lack of imagination, with the view that this strategy in
general (studying deficits) is the best route to studying human
psychology (see p. 56)? I might suggest alternatively that we study
people with other forms of defective imagination (e.g. people with
schizophrenic disorders. Perhaps "too much" rather than "too little"
imagination) might be equally well worth studying and perhaps would lead
us to draw altogether different conclusions about film viewing and
imagination from Currie's own.
Cynthia
Cynthia Freeland
Department of Philosophy
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204-3785
[log in to unmask]
http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan
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