Creativity requires some imagination - conscious and/or unconscious. Imagination requires perception and memory. The concept of imagination is not well-defined. Imagination's ambiguous meaning may account for the difficulty in promoting it in the field of crime and intelligence analysis. One thing I am certain - when we talk about imagination, we are not talking about creating art or inventing in our field. We are talking about a need for the ability to put ideas together to explain what was and is so to better predict what might happen to help us adequately address the present and prepare for the future. The ability to have good, relevant ideas is what we mean by imagination. Imagination means better thinking, and, in the concepts listed in the excerpt below, include concepts numbered one, two, five, and eight.
From: CHAPTER 1 IMAGINATION: THE MISSING MYSTERY OF PHILOSOPHY? by Michael Beaney
"Twelve conceptions of imagination"
"Can we say anything more systematic about the different ways in which we talk of imagination? In a paper entitled ‘Twelve conceptions of imagination’ (2003), Leslie Stevenson distinguishes the following meanings of imagination, which I list here (in italics) as he formulates them, together with my own examples to illustrate each one:
1 The ability to think of something that is not presently perceived, but is, was or will be spatio-temporally real. In this sense I might imagine how my daughter looks as I speak to her on the phone, how she used to look when she was a baby, or how she will look when I give her the present I have bought her.
2 The ability to think of whatever one acknowledges as possible in the spatiotemporal world. In this sense I might imagine how my room will look painted in a different colour.
3 The liability to think of something which the subject believes to be real, but which is not real. Stevenson talks of ‘liability’ rather than ‘ability’ here to indicate that there is some kind of failure in the cognitive process. In this sense I might imagine that there is someone out to get me, or Macbeth imagines that there is a dagger in front of him.
4 The ability to think of things one conceives of as fictional, as opposed to what one believes to be real, or conceives of as possibly real. In this sense I might imagine what the characters in a book are like, or imagine the actors in a film or theatre as the characters they portray, aware that the characters are only fictional.
5 The ability to entertain mental images. Here I might conjure up an image of a large, black spider or a five-sided geometrical figure.
6 The ability to think of (conceive of, or represent) anything at all. Here I might imagine anything from an object before me being transformed in some way to an evil demon systematically deceiving me.
7 The non-rational operations of the mind, that is, those kinds of mental functioning which are explicable in terms of causes rather than reasons. Here I might imagine that smoking is good form since I associate it with the cool behaviour of those I see smoking in films. It may not be rational, but there is a causal explanation in terms of the association of ideas, upon which advertisers rely so much.
8 The ability to form beliefs, on the basis of perception, about public objects in three-dimensional space which can exist unperceived, with spatial parts and temporal duration.Here I might imagine that the whole of something exists when I can only see part of it, or that it continues to exist when I look away.
9 The sensuous component in the appreciation of works of art or objects of natural beauty without classifying them under concepts or thinking of them as practically useful. In looking at a painting or hearing a piece of music, for example, I may be stimulated into imagining all sorts of things without conceptualizing it as a epresentation of anything definite, or seeing it as serving any particular purpose.
10 The ability to create works of art that encourage such sensuous appreciation. In composing a piece of music, the composer too may imagine all sorts of things without conceptualizing it in any definite way in the sense, say, of having a message that they want to get across.
11 The ability to appreciate things that are expressive or revelatory of the meaning of human life. In contemplating a craggy mountain range at dusk, for example, or a painting by Caspar David Friedrich depicting such a scene, I may imagine how much we are subject to the awesome power of the natural world, and yet ourselves have the conceptual and imaginative
power to transcend it all in thought.
12 The ability to create works of art that express something deep about the meaning of human life, as opposed to the products of mere fantasy. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Goethe’s Faust, Beethoven’s late string quartets or Wagner’s Ring cycle might all be offered as examples of this final conception of imagination."
For more thinking on this subject, read the article below - which do not necessarily agree with my point in the title of this post:
Concepts and Imagination: Contrary to popular believe, concepts and imagination do not necessarily go hand in hand
What Does Imagination Have to Do with Creativity?
No comments:
Post a Comment