Knowing by imagining

If one thinks about imagination from a broadly evolutionary perspective, it is quite an elaborate faculty that humans have, and maybe other animals as well. And you would expect it to have some kind of adaptive function. When you think of it in those terms, it is not so difficult to see what the answer is.

Take the case of decision making, which of course is something that all intelligent animals have to do. The difference between good decisions and bad decisions can be a matter of life and death. So when you're choosing between several options, you have to think about what the consequences would be if you took a given option. And then you have to compare those between the options.

What that involves is supposing that you do take that option — let's say that you go right. Another example would be when you're deciding between fight and flight: you have to think, what will happen if I fight this creature? And so you're asking yourself conditional hypothetical questions.

The way that we make those assessments is by making the supposition that you take the option and then imagining what will happen if you do. The imagining is done in a reality-constrained way. It's not just making something up; it's a kind of realistic imagining, starting from a hypothetical supposition. And that's what we need imagination for: to enable us to think these things through.

What's going on is a kind of offline form of cognition. When we're getting new information about our environment, through perception for example, we're updating online on this new information. But when we're in suppositional mode, what we're doing is making a supposition and then updating on that supposition offline in imagination. And then we can compare the results for different options and take a decision on that basis.

There's a different use of imagination which is also fundamentally cognitive, which has to do with using the imagination to think up solutions to problems. Imagine some group of Stone Age people who have to cross a river. When they are assessing these solutions or proposed solutions to the problem of how to cross the river, they develop them in their imagination to see whether doing such and such would really lead to crossing the river. For example, whether if they tried to swim across, they would make it or just be carried away because the river is running so fast, and so on. So another cognitive use of imagination is in coming up with these potential solutions.

That is very similar to what artists are doing when they come up with scenarios or ideas, or whatever it may be. They are using the imagination in this more open-ended way, but it is still constrained by reality in all kinds of respects.

So we have to be able to think in this less constrained way. But it's never totally unconstrained.

We should be more open to the importance of developing children's imagination. This is something that they will need in order to make good decisions and come up with solutions to problems. Someone who is unimaginative — it's not just that things are boring for them — their capacity to deal with a complicated and changing world is very much reduced by their lack of imagination.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2026