The imagination as an interpretive function: consequences for education through art

Abstract

Throughout the history of Western philosophy the definition of the concept of “imagination” has been based on dimensions such as body, sensitive intuition, perception, mental images, memory, fantasy, spontaneity, the combination of ideas and creativity. Some contemporary epistemologists who refer to the analytical philosophy of Kant have tried to recover the conceptualization of the imagination in the cognitive field. In the present work, we travel a different path. We refer to the psychological approach of the “creative imagination” developed by the French Théodule-Armand Ribot at the end of the 19th century; and by Lev Vygotsky, who thirty years later gave continuity to many of Ribot's ideas. Based on the postulates of both psychologists, we propose to understand the imagination as a psychic function that also underlies all processes of interpretation/compression. Based on this objective, a conceptual parallel is explored between the psychological description of the creative mechanism of imagination and the semiotic notion proposed by Umberto Eco of “invention of sign functions”, trying to sketch the complexity of the phenomenon of the reception of art. From this interdisciplinary perspective, some of the consequences of the theory developed for an education through art are finally explored.