Delocks asked:

What is imagination?

Can you comment on Roger Scruton's Imagination I & II in his book Art and Imagination?

What are concepts and concept formation? what is thinking?

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I don't have a theory of imagination, so can only comment on Scruton's. In Imagination I, the first
feature, that we imagine something, or that there is an object of imagination seems undeniable. The
second feature that in the normal case imagination is subject to the will seems difficult to criticise
when we think of bringing images to mind, although the will doesn't seem to be involved in aspect
perception, such as seeing the duck in the duck-rabbit in a creative way. The feature that we have
incorrigible knowledge of what we imagine might be criticised on the ground that knowledge is not
appropriate to internal experience, since there is no means of justification and no possibility of
confirmation. I'm not sure about the fourth feature, that there is a verbal criteria for saying that a
person is imagining something, because sometimes a statement can falsify what is imagined, or
doesn't fully express what it is we imagine. Scruton himself thinks there is more to what is imagined
than that which can be expressed verbally, since a person has to experience an aspect to understand
what another is imagining, although this itself has been criticised by Malcolm Budd..

Scruton thinks that imagination covers a wide range of activities, but I think he goes too far. In
Imagination II, Scruton thinks that the man who sees the duck aspect of the duck-rabbit 'must say
something like "It is as though I were seeing a duck"', which indicates an imaginative experience as
an unasserted thought. This seems false. We actually are seeing the shape of a duck and we are
able to do this because we know what a duck looks like. Similarly, the claim that "It takes imagination
to see the sadness in X's face" seems doubtful. If we know what sadness is and how it is expressed,
this is an ordinary perceptual experience.

The idea of imagination as unasserted thought, thought that goes beyond what we believe, is also
difficult to accept. Music is not the sort of thing which can be sad, and to perceive it as sad, is not to
say that it is sad, so Scruton avoids the apparent nonsense of ascribing an emotion directly to music.
However, I'd be more inclined to say it is true that the music is sad and, for sure, that I believe it is,
rather than that it is appropriate to say so. However, this requires a different approach to truth, and
would require an argument to the effect that metaphor is true (and since a word used metaphorically
is used falsely of its object, this is a difficult approach to take). The concept of sadness is of an
emotion felt by living beings and it is part of the concept that it is expressed in a certain way, since the
way it is expressed allows us to understand sadness as felt by another. So although it cannot apply to
music, as an alternative to the problems raised by consideration of metaphors, I'd be inclined to think
that sadness has a certain something, an inner movement, that cannot be put into words or
conceptualised and that it is this we find in music.

You ask what a concept is and very simplistically, because we don't know for sure, it is either taken
as a particular mental representation or a word for something. As a mental representation, concept
formation would be determined by memory. As a word, concept formation is learnt socially, as we
learn a language.

Thinking is the movement of conceptual content, and Scruton would say, that in contrast to imagining,
it is asserted. This doesn't seem to be so, but it is the case that a thought is either true and false and
if we think something is true, we would assert it. Normally we only ascribe thought to a being with a
language although this isn't necessary if we think by means of mental representations or concept
formation is a facility for ordering information.

Rachel Browne