Imagination

Calling imagination a black box word is a specific charge rather than a dismissal. Black box words are words with no definition other than circular, often used to pretend a meaning where none is known or to disguise a meaning that runs against the authoritative endoreality, and imagination qualifies because nobody has ever supplied a non-circular account of it. Marsh makes the point sharply when arguing against the standard explanation of empathy. Karen Horney and most researchers since believed empathy was imagination, a word for which no one has ever provided anything but a circular definition, and her counterexamples show why the word cannot do the work asked of it. We do not imagine the feelings of a loved one in distress, we feel their distress, sometimes before knowing of it, and sometimes we feel an emotion empathically that we have never experienced ourselves, which leaves imagination nothing to work from. What she proposes in its place follows from her account of the conscious. If the conscious is all that exists and awareness of every interaction from all perspectives, and consciousness is a filtered slice presented from one position, then material arriving from outside that position is not being invented but glimpsed. Dreams and trance states are where the endofilter relaxes enough for it to arrive. This is part of the abstraction her title names, since conscious is abstracted into the black box words imagination and nothing.

Imagination has a substantial philosophical literature, from Hume and Kant on its role in cognition to contemporary work on mental imagery and counterfactual thinking, and cognitive science studies it through the default mode network and simulation accounts of memory and prospection. Coleridge distinguished imagination from fancy. Marsh's charge is not that these accounts are wrong in detail but that the word names a gap rather than a mechanism, and her own proposal, that some of what is called imagination is perception of something outside individual perspective, is a metaphysical claim rather than a psychological one and would not be accepted within either discipline.