How One Cannot Imagine What One Could Imagine

The puzzle of imaginative resistance, i.e., the puzzle of explaining why people resist imagining that some actions are right or wrong for the reasons outlined in the fiction, is admittedly intriguing. For on the one hand, it seems that there is no problem in understanding all sentences of a certain piece of fiction, in particular the problematic ones emphasized by the puzzle, for people are quite able to represent what they (fictionally) mean. Yet on the other hand, it seems that the puzzling sentences are so problematic that people want to mentally distance themselves from what they seemingly describe. In this paper, first, after having critically discussed the extent of relevant solutions to the puzzle, we will present our account. For us, the puzzle of imaginative resistance is a pragmatic issue concerning the failure of participative or empathic imagination, as located at a pre-semantic level. The linguistic meaning of the relevant sentences involved violates some of our moral beliefs. Thus, at the level of a wide context (i.e., the overall situation of discourse), we pre-semantically refrain from pairing such sentences with a fictional truth-conditional content in a narrow fictional context (i.e., the set-theoretical kind of context constituted by a series of fixed parameters) based on such a meaning, although we could theoretically make that pairing. Yet second, we want to stress that our solution is flexible enough to explain why sometimes people can regain participative imagination concerning the relevant sentences. For, still at the very same pre-semantic level, people can adopt some repair strategy allowing them to take on again the perspective the narrator prescribes to imagine. The structure of the paper is the following. In Section 1, we describe the puzzle and critically discuss the extent of relevant solutions to it. In Section 2, we present our account of the puzzle. In Section 3, we hopefully show some of its possible advantages.