The Role of Imagination in Decision‐Making

Abstract

The psychological mechanism of decision‐making has traditionally been modeled with the help of belief‐desire psychology: the agent has some desires (or other pro‐attitudes) and some background beliefs and deciding between two possible actions is a matter of comparing the probability of the satisfaction of these desires given the background beliefs in the case of the performance of each action. There is a wealth of recent empirical findings about how we actually make decisions that seems to be in conflict with this picture. My aim is to outline an alternative model that is consistent with these empirical findings. This alternative model emphasizes the role imagination plays in our decisions: when we decide between two possible actions, we imagine ourselves in the situation that we imagine to be the outcome of these two actions and then compare these two imaginings.

Perceptual Decision-Making and Beyond: Intention as Mental Imagery

“…van Leeuwen 2013, 226 We can imagine a wide range of examples of this basic type, where the way mental imagery unfolds in time is governed by our dispositional mental states. I can "deliberate" in imagination when it comes to settling on an intention (Nanay 2016), and my deliberations will be constrained by what I believe it is possible for me to do, and what I think is the likely result of some imagined action. Furthermore, we see no reason to limit this governing role to beliefs.…”

Intending, believing, and supposing at will

“…And these accounts all give states of supposition the right kind of contents and structure to support functions of action guidance and reasoning. As an aside, this latter point should come as no surprise: it is widely recognized that states of imagination are useful for purposes of action guidance and reasoning (for elaboration, see Funkhouser & Spaulding, ; Nanay, ; Van Leeuwen, ).…”

DE SE PREFERENCES AND EMPATHY FOR FUTURE SELVES1

“…Timothy Williamson discusses how imagination can play a role in the discovery and justification of knowledge, for example, when a person uses his imagination to form a true belief as to what would happen to him in hypothetical circumstances, and Magdelena Balcerak Jackson has also recently argued that imagination provides us with justification . Bence Nanay defends the idea that there is an important role for imagination in representing and comparing different outcomes when an agent is trying to make decisions between possibilities for her future . Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack discuss first person decision‐making involving reasoning about anticipated regret, and Dilip Ninan explores the relationship between imagination and the self .…”