Imagination in the Semiotics of Creativity

Abstract

The research analyzes the concept of imagination set in the context of semiotics of creativity. It specifies the essence of this concept from the point of pragmatic, syntactic and semantic rules applied in imaginative thinking. The objectives of the research are to explicate the history of the concept of imagination; to define the role of imagination in the projective semiosis of reason, mind and perception; to identify the relationship between imagination and intuition in the creative act. The material of the research is the history of forms of philosophical and psychological reflection on “imagination”, “intuition”, “creativity” from I. Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, P.K. Engelmeyer, F. Dessauer, S.L. Rubinstein and up to the latest semiotics of creativity and technology. The research method is semiotic modeling, representing any phenomenon as a sign in receptive and projective semiosis, realizing as a complex, organized representation of contents in the substrates of sensory perception, mind and reason. In the receptive processes (in the acts of cognition and understanding), the order of representation is determined by the ascent from the reality to the concept: sensory perception, mind, reason. In projective processes (in acts of creativity, technology, interpretation, practice, etc.), the order of representation is reversed: from the concept (phantasm, image) to its logical-grammatical construction and to its physical embodiment in the form of an artifact. The study is built as an expansion and substantiation of the thesis that imagination is, firstly, the environment for the implementation of semiosis, and, secondly, it is one of the ways to remove uncertainty that arises both in reception and in projection. As an environment, imagination is revealed as a condition for the possibility of applying rules in the substrates of reason and mind and is defined as the sphere of the thinkable and imaginable, but impossible in the physical world. The uncertainty, in the epistemological sense, means the situations of knowledge about not knowing for receptive processes and not knowing about knowledge for projective processes. Removing the uncertainty, the imagination is revealed as an addition to reality within the framework of the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic rules of sensory perception, mind and reason. The analysis of imagination, as an addition to perception, is illustrated by the data of experimental psychology, in particular, the Zagorsk Experiment; as an addition to the mind by the concept of secondary modeling systems or semiological systems by Yu.M. Lotman and R. Barthes; as an addition to the reason by a comparative analysis of the concepts of intuition and imagination. The study concludes that the functional definition of imagination as an addition to reality at the levels of reason, mind and perception is justified both in the context of the theory of creativity, adhering to the model of “three-act”, and in the context of semiotic ontology itself.