Overactive (and Underactive) Imagination

Abstract What do we make of someone who claims not to believe something, and yet whose behaviours suggest belief – such as someone who claims not to believe in ghosts, yet refuses to walk through the graveyard at night, or someone who claims to know that they have switched off the oven, yet feels the need to go and check? Some have proposed treating cases like these in terms of states of ‘half belief’ or ‘in-between’ belief. We propose that sometimes these cases are best understood not as an epistemic matter concerning such compromised belief states, but rather as an aesthetic matter concerning imaginative states and what they enable us to appreciate about the actual world. Anxiety over the graveyard, or over the oven, can be characterised in terms of the explanatory structures the person is disposed to imagine – explanatory structures which the person knows are non-actual, but which would explain were the world to work differently. Overactive imagination is where one’s preoccupation with imagining a non-actual explanatory structure takes priority over things that it should not. Underactive imagination is where a person is insensitive to how aspects of the world support the imagining of non-actual explanatory structures.