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The Work of the Imagination
This book demonstrates how children's imagination makes a continuing contribution to their cognitive and emotional development.
235 pages, Paperback
First published November 8, 2000
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March 15, 2023
This book consists in a fascinating juxtaposition of different empirical findings, from different experimental paradigms, where Harris proposes his high order theorizing about the nature of the mind, in light of these findings. Harris's overall thesis is that it is intrinsic to our nature to be capable of imagining various sorts of things, which is integral to our being the cooperative social creatures and intelligent knowers that we are. This point stands contrary to some historical assumptions in psychology about the imagination as found in children: Freud and Piaget had believed that the imagination was "autistic," or it made children turn inwards, detach from the social realm, and confuse their desire-driven fantasy with reality.
In chapter 1, Harris goes over these historical assumptions. To add a few more details, Piaget also believed that make-believe games that children play are continuous with their talking to themselves. They first talk to themselves, and when this is not socially acceptable, repress it, and it comes out in their play of such games. Both such speech and play are supposed to be maladaptive, where the child refuses to acknowledge the social world and reality.
In chapters 2-3, Harris goes over literature on children's games of make-believe and argues that pretend play is in fact an expression of a child's constructive engagement with the social and natural worlds. By age 2, children can spontaneously invent games of make-believe and improvise props for them (e.g., pretending a lump of mud is a slice of cake). Piaget had a confused picture of props as used in pretend play; he believed that the child would actually take or at least desire for the mud to be cake. Harris proposes that we distinguish between the function of real life objects to inspire children to pretend something, and the function of those objects as serving as referents of some symbol. In playing games of make-believe, children engage with real life objects for the former, not the latter function. In other words, children are constantly aware that the fictional worlds they create are just fictional, and they keep information about what goes down in those worlds neatly relativized to those worlds, segregated from the domain of information about the real world. Moreover, pretend play in children often involves role play. This aids them in developing skills to grasp how other people think, feel, and act.
In chapter 4, Harris goes deeper into the point that children don't confuse make-believe and reality. Here, Harris also tackles "the paradox of fictional emotion" (cf. Walton, Moran). Harris's solution is to posit distinct systems that are responsible for reality assessment. He solves this paradox by arguing that fiction does produce genuine emotion in us, but it quickly goes away once we assess that it is merely imagined, and does not have actual implications. Harris proposes that our mind's capacity to engage in fictions is closely related to its capacities to entertain future possibilities, and to learn from testimony (to imaginatively register the experiences of other people through conversation). This is why we can have experiences of fictional worlds that feel as immersive and urgent as our anxieties and hopes regarding our personal futures. (I disagree with Harris's position here; I do not think at any point in our engagement with fiction we actually take it to be the case that the contents we imagine are happened, or are historically factual.)
I particularly like Harris's suggestion that our engagement in fiction is based in our language capacity, whose original function is acquiring info by testimony. This sounds right; perhaps one pleasure of fiction is that our senses are as engaged as they are when we listen to others tell us about the world, but we're aware throughout that this is all merely fictional. Perhaps this also stems from our capacity to listen to people whom we know are lying or exaggerating. The pleasure of making-believe is that the aim here is not to tell the truth, so lies and exaggerations are impossible, but the same content that'd constitute those are presented here under a new form of their own.
In chapters 5-8, Harris goes through the functions of the imagination in generating counterfactual possibilities and aiding in the acquisition of knowledge. In chapter 5, Harris revisits an old question raised by the Soviet psychologist Luria: do peasants (or any humans not educated in a Western system) think or reason in the same way as educated Westerners do? His findings, from the mid 19th century, suggest that they do not. They cannot inferentially reason as we do, but let personal past experience drive their answers to questions (formed as syllogistic premises about subject matter they haven't encountered before).
Harris shows that modern evidence suggests otherwise. Any human being is able to set aside facts of personal experience and draw a syllogistic inference. It's just that they have to be primed in the right way; toddlers told to treat the puzzle as consisting in descriptions of an imaginary world, where empirical considerations are to be set aside, are much more likely to draw the inference correctly, than those who are not primed as such. Western education just provides further cognitive training to be sensitive to the facts that there are a lot of facts possessed by humans about subject matter beyond one's personal experience, and so these facts are to be treated analogously to suppositions about imaginary worlds, with respect to that both kinds of content are untethered to personal experience.
I found this to be particularly fascinating. I've been playing around with the idea that make-believe and certain beliefs (where these clash with "what the heart knows") are continuous in functional status. The empirical studies Harris cites, as well as his theorizing about them, supports this idea.
In chapter 6, Harris examines counterfactual thinking as found in children. When toddlers are asked why a certain outcome from a person's action happened, they will cite causal factors that are most emotionally salient. There are many antecedent factors that could be chosen from, but they will select only the emotionally salient ones, or the ones that if changed could obviously lead to a different outcome (if they are primed with the question of what could've been done to avoid the outcome). Harris takes this to show that the imagination, which is operative in counterfactual thinking, is responsible for our becoming aware of previously invisible causal factors in the world.
In chapter 7, Harris examines social/ethical normativity, as another sort of rule sensitivity, close to that which underpins counterfactual thinking. Toddlers are very good at tracking social norms and violations to them.
In chapter 8, Harris examines empirical literature on children who are prompted to explain events that appear to be impossible (manufactured through illusions, unbeknownst to the children). Do children invoke supernatural explanations, or explanations based in physical, everyday observations? When children are older (4-6 years old), they are more likely to appeal to magic. Harris explains this by the fact that older children are more knowledgeable of what is physically possible in the world, and so they are more sensitive to the fact that physical explanations can't explain these. In contrast, younger children are still learning about the basic physics, and in their incomplete understanding, can fathom that these physical laws extend to these seemingly impossible cases.
There's also a fun experimental paradigm where psychologists give children an empty box, show them it is empty, and ask them to pretend that the box contains something, which serves as variable which varies along how desirable v. fearful, and everyday v. magical, it is (e.g., the box contains a monster or a bunny). The experimenter leaves the room, and the children are measured for whether they check the box. About half the children check, half do not, and a few have mixed responses. Harris explains this by saying that children are more likely to check if their imagination is able to vividly generate a possible series of events that could've led to the object getting into the previously empty box; this leads to their impulse to "reality-check." (I imagine that another key factor in this explanation would be the extent to which the child trusts the experimenter; while the experimenter said to just pretend, and the box is empty, if the experimenter isn't trustworthy, there is more likely to be something else going on).
As a whole this is a very interesting book, and I'd recommend it to anyone interesting in how we can know about things that we've never encountered through personal experience, and how we can do this in light of the fact that we can also "encounter" all sorts of fanciful things (how do we keep the two apart? -- there is no deeper theoretical explanation offered in this book, but there's lots of empirical evidence that the capacity to keep the two apart is ontogenetically primitive).
In chapter 1, Harris goes over these historical assumptions. To add a few more details, Piaget also believed that make-believe games that children play are continuous with their talking to themselves. They first talk to themselves, and when this is not socially acceptable, repress it, and it comes out in their play of such games. Both such speech and play are supposed to be maladaptive, where the child refuses to acknowledge the social world and reality.
In chapters 2-3, Harris goes over literature on children's games of make-believe and argues that pretend play is in fact an expression of a child's constructive engagement with the social and natural worlds. By age 2, children can spontaneously invent games of make-believe and improvise props for them (e.g., pretending a lump of mud is a slice of cake). Piaget had a confused picture of props as used in pretend play; he believed that the child would actually take or at least desire for the mud to be cake. Harris proposes that we distinguish between the function of real life objects to inspire children to pretend something, and the function of those objects as serving as referents of some symbol. In playing games of make-believe, children engage with real life objects for the former, not the latter function. In other words, children are constantly aware that the fictional worlds they create are just fictional, and they keep information about what goes down in those worlds neatly relativized to those worlds, segregated from the domain of information about the real world. Moreover, pretend play in children often involves role play. This aids them in developing skills to grasp how other people think, feel, and act.
In chapter 4, Harris goes deeper into the point that children don't confuse make-believe and reality. Here, Harris also tackles "the paradox of fictional emotion" (cf. Walton, Moran). Harris's solution is to posit distinct systems that are responsible for reality assessment. He solves this paradox by arguing that fiction does produce genuine emotion in us, but it quickly goes away once we assess that it is merely imagined, and does not have actual implications. Harris proposes that our mind's capacity to engage in fictions is closely related to its capacities to entertain future possibilities, and to learn from testimony (to imaginatively register the experiences of other people through conversation). This is why we can have experiences of fictional worlds that feel as immersive and urgent as our anxieties and hopes regarding our personal futures. (I disagree with Harris's position here; I do not think at any point in our engagement with fiction we actually take it to be the case that the contents we imagine are happened, or are historically factual.)
I particularly like Harris's suggestion that our engagement in fiction is based in our language capacity, whose original function is acquiring info by testimony. This sounds right; perhaps one pleasure of fiction is that our senses are as engaged as they are when we listen to others tell us about the world, but we're aware throughout that this is all merely fictional. Perhaps this also stems from our capacity to listen to people whom we know are lying or exaggerating. The pleasure of making-believe is that the aim here is not to tell the truth, so lies and exaggerations are impossible, but the same content that'd constitute those are presented here under a new form of their own.
In chapters 5-8, Harris goes through the functions of the imagination in generating counterfactual possibilities and aiding in the acquisition of knowledge. In chapter 5, Harris revisits an old question raised by the Soviet psychologist Luria: do peasants (or any humans not educated in a Western system) think or reason in the same way as educated Westerners do? His findings, from the mid 19th century, suggest that they do not. They cannot inferentially reason as we do, but let personal past experience drive their answers to questions (formed as syllogistic premises about subject matter they haven't encountered before).
Harris shows that modern evidence suggests otherwise. Any human being is able to set aside facts of personal experience and draw a syllogistic inference. It's just that they have to be primed in the right way; toddlers told to treat the puzzle as consisting in descriptions of an imaginary world, where empirical considerations are to be set aside, are much more likely to draw the inference correctly, than those who are not primed as such. Western education just provides further cognitive training to be sensitive to the facts that there are a lot of facts possessed by humans about subject matter beyond one's personal experience, and so these facts are to be treated analogously to suppositions about imaginary worlds, with respect to that both kinds of content are untethered to personal experience.
I found this to be particularly fascinating. I've been playing around with the idea that make-believe and certain beliefs (where these clash with "what the heart knows") are continuous in functional status. The empirical studies Harris cites, as well as his theorizing about them, supports this idea.
In chapter 6, Harris examines counterfactual thinking as found in children. When toddlers are asked why a certain outcome from a person's action happened, they will cite causal factors that are most emotionally salient. There are many antecedent factors that could be chosen from, but they will select only the emotionally salient ones, or the ones that if changed could obviously lead to a different outcome (if they are primed with the question of what could've been done to avoid the outcome). Harris takes this to show that the imagination, which is operative in counterfactual thinking, is responsible for our becoming aware of previously invisible causal factors in the world.
In chapter 7, Harris examines social/ethical normativity, as another sort of rule sensitivity, close to that which underpins counterfactual thinking. Toddlers are very good at tracking social norms and violations to them.
In chapter 8, Harris examines empirical literature on children who are prompted to explain events that appear to be impossible (manufactured through illusions, unbeknownst to the children). Do children invoke supernatural explanations, or explanations based in physical, everyday observations? When children are older (4-6 years old), they are more likely to appeal to magic. Harris explains this by the fact that older children are more knowledgeable of what is physically possible in the world, and so they are more sensitive to the fact that physical explanations can't explain these. In contrast, younger children are still learning about the basic physics, and in their incomplete understanding, can fathom that these physical laws extend to these seemingly impossible cases.
There's also a fun experimental paradigm where psychologists give children an empty box, show them it is empty, and ask them to pretend that the box contains something, which serves as variable which varies along how desirable v. fearful, and everyday v. magical, it is (e.g., the box contains a monster or a bunny). The experimenter leaves the room, and the children are measured for whether they check the box. About half the children check, half do not, and a few have mixed responses. Harris explains this by saying that children are more likely to check if their imagination is able to vividly generate a possible series of events that could've led to the object getting into the previously empty box; this leads to their impulse to "reality-check." (I imagine that another key factor in this explanation would be the extent to which the child trusts the experimenter; while the experimenter said to just pretend, and the box is empty, if the experimenter isn't trustworthy, there is more likely to be something else going on).
As a whole this is a very interesting book, and I'd recommend it to anyone interesting in how we can know about things that we've never encountered through personal experience, and how we can do this in light of the fact that we can also "encounter" all sorts of fanciful things (how do we keep the two apart? -- there is no deeper theoretical explanation offered in this book, but there's lots of empirical evidence that the capacity to keep the two apart is ontogenetically primitive).
September 20, 2013
For all that this book is endlessly concluded and has the academic version of a Bulwer-Lytton opening line, it is mostly smoothly written, engaging, and interesting (though it does lose its foting about three-quarters of the way through, before righting itself). Harris convincingly argues for a view of imagination in children (and adults) that stands both against the Freudian/Piaget tradition and the developing vogue for 'children as scientists.
He argues that imaginative thinking is not the base-line thinking for children, as Freud and Piaget both claimed. Rather, role-playing, counterfactuals, and imagining the impossible are developed in children. They start out understanding the world has physical limits, even if they are sometimes wrong about these limits or naive. But, as they develop they learn imagination and how to use it.
The first part of the book looks at how children use imagination in role playing. Such role playing is not stereotyped, but plastic and playful. Harris argues that children's imaginative worlds--the ones in which they role play--are separate from (and acknowledged by the child as different than) the mundane world, although they do import notions from the real world into the fantastical one--concepts such as causality and temporality. Role playing in children, he says, is like reading in adults--an absorption into an acknowledged otherworld (and thus imagination is always at least partly ironic). Through role playing children learn to be empathetic--not because they develop a theory of mind, necessarily, but because they learn to run simulations, effectively imagining themselves into other scenarios. Indeed, the ability to role play may be a stable feature of personality, and those kids who are most adept at it also tend to be most empathetic. Imagination is thus not a withdrawal from the world--but a way of engaging and learning about it (8-9).
Harris notes that children are often thought to confuse the real world and the fantastic because of the intensity of emotions they display toward their fantasy, but argues this emotion is not a sign of confusion but a developmental stage. Even adults get emotionally wrapped up in fantastic worlds--crying from reading a sad book, say, shivering from a scary one--but can modulate themselves better because they can remind themselves that the fantastic world is not real. Children, while recognizing that the two worlds are separate, take a while to learn this maneuver. This section is probably the least convincing, and seems less driven by the experiments he presents throughout than his own insistence that kids always recognize the difference between the real and the imaginary. The hypothesis especially breaks down in his comparison of adults reading to children with imaginary playmates. The emotions adults feel upon reading are created by the author's manipulation of the story; kids who get upset about the actions of their imaginary friends are still in control of those friends, even if they don't acknowledge it, which does suggest that kids more freely blend imagination and reality than Harris allows.
The second section of the book--although the book is not formally divided into sections--looks at how imagination informs reasoning. Young children know how to use counterfactuals and deontic reasoning. Education actually yokes this form of imagination. Educated children come to understand that logical problems are genres with rules and they have to allow for their imagination to work in these situations, accepting what their teacher tells them even when it seems implausible. It is in this section that Harris loses control of his narrative. Again, then, imagination is a way of approaching the world, not moving away from it.
Finally, Harris examines the most talked about role of the imagination--probing the magical and the impossible. He again insists that children are, at first, drawn to mundane explanations for the structure of reality, and rarely invoke magic. Rather, magical thinking is developed, by learning the rules of certain genres (such as fairy tales) or through rituals (such a religion). Even in fiercely magical societies, he argues, young kids do not accept magical explanations at first. However, this argument is not just another version of the baby-as-scientist argument. Magical thinking and contemplation of the impossible play important cognitive roles in the development of children.
The contemplation of the magical and the impossible, he says, made possible by imagination feeds back and 'infuses' everyday life, so that children come to see that the mundane world may, indeed, contain magic. Such contemplation, he argues in a final chapter, that picks up threads left in chapter four, is also a necessary part of a complex language. It is possible to speak about the here and now without imagination. But to speak of the past or the present--to say nothing of the magical or the impossible--requires imagination. Quite possibly, then, there was an adaptive reason for the development of imagination--since evolutionary theory would otherwise seem to suggest that it would be best for humans to be completely focused on the factual.
This last argument, about the evolutionary importance of imagination, is emblematic of a problem I had throughout the book--Harris's constant search for functional explanations. (I know! A functionalist psychologist! Who would have thought?) It explains his high-school-essay-beginning (since the dawn of man, imagination has been important), but generally can be ignored or accepted as one wants.
In sum, to conclude again, in the spirit of his writing, the book is a good one, mostly well written and mostly closely argued, and I earned a lot from it.
He argues that imaginative thinking is not the base-line thinking for children, as Freud and Piaget both claimed. Rather, role-playing, counterfactuals, and imagining the impossible are developed in children. They start out understanding the world has physical limits, even if they are sometimes wrong about these limits or naive. But, as they develop they learn imagination and how to use it.
The first part of the book looks at how children use imagination in role playing. Such role playing is not stereotyped, but plastic and playful. Harris argues that children's imaginative worlds--the ones in which they role play--are separate from (and acknowledged by the child as different than) the mundane world, although they do import notions from the real world into the fantastical one--concepts such as causality and temporality. Role playing in children, he says, is like reading in adults--an absorption into an acknowledged otherworld (and thus imagination is always at least partly ironic). Through role playing children learn to be empathetic--not because they develop a theory of mind, necessarily, but because they learn to run simulations, effectively imagining themselves into other scenarios. Indeed, the ability to role play may be a stable feature of personality, and those kids who are most adept at it also tend to be most empathetic. Imagination is thus not a withdrawal from the world--but a way of engaging and learning about it (8-9).
Harris notes that children are often thought to confuse the real world and the fantastic because of the intensity of emotions they display toward their fantasy, but argues this emotion is not a sign of confusion but a developmental stage. Even adults get emotionally wrapped up in fantastic worlds--crying from reading a sad book, say, shivering from a scary one--but can modulate themselves better because they can remind themselves that the fantastic world is not real. Children, while recognizing that the two worlds are separate, take a while to learn this maneuver. This section is probably the least convincing, and seems less driven by the experiments he presents throughout than his own insistence that kids always recognize the difference between the real and the imaginary. The hypothesis especially breaks down in his comparison of adults reading to children with imaginary playmates. The emotions adults feel upon reading are created by the author's manipulation of the story; kids who get upset about the actions of their imaginary friends are still in control of those friends, even if they don't acknowledge it, which does suggest that kids more freely blend imagination and reality than Harris allows.
The second section of the book--although the book is not formally divided into sections--looks at how imagination informs reasoning. Young children know how to use counterfactuals and deontic reasoning. Education actually yokes this form of imagination. Educated children come to understand that logical problems are genres with rules and they have to allow for their imagination to work in these situations, accepting what their teacher tells them even when it seems implausible. It is in this section that Harris loses control of his narrative. Again, then, imagination is a way of approaching the world, not moving away from it.
Finally, Harris examines the most talked about role of the imagination--probing the magical and the impossible. He again insists that children are, at first, drawn to mundane explanations for the structure of reality, and rarely invoke magic. Rather, magical thinking is developed, by learning the rules of certain genres (such as fairy tales) or through rituals (such a religion). Even in fiercely magical societies, he argues, young kids do not accept magical explanations at first. However, this argument is not just another version of the baby-as-scientist argument. Magical thinking and contemplation of the impossible play important cognitive roles in the development of children.
The contemplation of the magical and the impossible, he says, made possible by imagination feeds back and 'infuses' everyday life, so that children come to see that the mundane world may, indeed, contain magic. Such contemplation, he argues in a final chapter, that picks up threads left in chapter four, is also a necessary part of a complex language. It is possible to speak about the here and now without imagination. But to speak of the past or the present--to say nothing of the magical or the impossible--requires imagination. Quite possibly, then, there was an adaptive reason for the development of imagination--since evolutionary theory would otherwise seem to suggest that it would be best for humans to be completely focused on the factual.
This last argument, about the evolutionary importance of imagination, is emblematic of a problem I had throughout the book--Harris's constant search for functional explanations. (I know! A functionalist psychologist! Who would have thought?) It explains his high-school-essay-beginning (since the dawn of man, imagination has been important), but generally can be ignored or accepted as one wants.
In sum, to conclude again, in the spirit of his writing, the book is a good one, mostly well written and mostly closely argued, and I earned a lot from it.
November 19, 2015
This is one of the books that I have to read for the MA that I will be running, Children's Imaginative Worlds. It sheds a fascinating light on why it is that children imagine friends, alternative scenarios and taken part in a lot of pretend play. It also looks at the change in how children use imagination as they grow up and how early children are able to associate pretend play as an imaginative experience (e.g. all children know that imaginary friends are exactly that: imaginary).
I particularly liked the chapter on how early on, developmentally, children can imagine a counterfactual alternative to an event. E.g. If you pushed a train to the end of a table and asked a child of two what would happen if it had gone further, then the child can, generally, picture it falling and possibly smashing on the floor. This leads to the interesting question of why it is that homo sapiens are drawn to the desire to conjure up situations in their imaginations. How does it serve us?
I particularly liked the chapter on how early on, developmentally, children can imagine a counterfactual alternative to an event. E.g. If you pushed a train to the end of a table and asked a child of two what would happen if it had gone further, then the child can, generally, picture it falling and possibly smashing on the floor. This leads to the interesting question of why it is that homo sapiens are drawn to the desire to conjure up situations in their imaginations. How does it serve us?
March 18, 2017
Harris presents a detailed overview of his own work in psychology (along with a survey of related literature), that explore the ways in which imagination and an understanding of causality and the mental states of others advance in children from about 24 to 60 months. Harris takes a position against Freud and Piaget, who felt that imagination was opposed to realism, and that an excess of imagination was a sign of a failure to understand and adapt to the real world, to demonstrate that even very young children can partake in fictive stances while understanding that they are fictional. Furthermore, several scales of imagination at different age groups appear to be strongly correlated with each other, along with linguistic development and social skills.
Harris provides a useful corrective to older theories in developmental psychology, but while I agree with his premise that imagination is a fundamental human capacity, I'm not sure that the evidence is strong enough to make his conclusions necessary.
Harris provides a useful corrective to older theories in developmental psychology, but while I agree with his premise that imagination is a fundamental human capacity, I'm not sure that the evidence is strong enough to make his conclusions necessary.
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