Introduction

The dangers of giving ground to a new, post-truth, order of discourse are recognised in former President Obama’s recent call to arms:

If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems. (e.g. Solon 2016)

On the face of it, there is an urgent need, in response to such a call, to reassert the value of good argument and of critical thinking. In the present environment, in which governments present alt facts, and mainstream journalism is disparaged by some politicians, critical thinking is being seen by some as a form of activism. Indeed, when I teach and write about critical thinking, I often present critical thinking as transformative and as a source of empowerment, a means of acquiring knowledge and habits of mind that enable one to speak truth to power. But the echo chamber of social media sourced news and current affairs coverage makes it harder to acquire and employ the skills and habits of mind of which responsible and critical inquiry are comprised. In critical thinking instruction, we emphasise that reaching the true or most likely belief involves examining candidate claims against a background of evidence, testing whether you would be justified in holding them. But if the evidence is sourced solely from within our own echo chamber, it is likely simply to reinforce our beliefs. And thus the oft-cited goal of what Paul (1992) calls “deep sense” critical thinking, that of taking and performing a critical stance towards our own deeply held beliefs, is undermined by the echo; within the chamber we encounter only those claims that resonate with us.

Another issue that this new political order brings into relief is a need to acknowledge the role of emotion as part of our response to the world and of our lived experiences of it. Many of the responses that we have when thinking about and discussing socio-political issues are both cognitive and affective. The need to acknowledge and accommodate this contrasts with the traditional approach to argument and to standard critical thinking instruction, according to which emotion has no place in critical thinking, but is instead the preserve of rhetoric. This does not mean that we should also become teachers of rhetoric. Rather, instead of simply identifying and calling out falsehoods and teaching others to do the same, we need to harness the potential of emotion and the facts of lived experiences as a route to reason—as a means of opening up the mind to considering alternative ways of thinking and of being. Fiction and story-telling, in general, have historically provided us with the means both to make sense of our experiences and to countenance possibilities other than the realities of our actual lives. Moreover, socially shared fictions can play a constitutive role in binding a group of individuals together, enabling us both to maintain existing and to create new ways of being.

In this essay, I address the challenges to good argumentation and reasoning posed by the post-truth order and argue that there is an acute need for argumentation theory to re-present ways in which emotion and reason work together to form, scrutinise and revise deeply held beliefs. I begin by considering deeply held beliefs, discussing the types of beliefs that tend to be deeply held and the ways in which they are acquired. Focussing on deeply held beliefs that are relevant to our socio-political imaginaries, beliefs that are prone to prejudice, bias and stereotyping associated with gender, race, sexuality, disability, class and other markers of difference and marginalisation, I consider the ways deeply held beliefs play a framework role in reinforcing our ways of being within the world.

With inspiration from Moira Gatens’ and Genevieve Lloyd’s Spinozistic take on the role of the imagination in changing our ways of being, as well as from Iris Marion Young’s work on asymmetrical reciprocity, in what follows I will discuss approaches to critical thinking that involve showing rather than stating alternatives to deeply held beliefs. In particular, I will focus on those involving narratives that provide alternative pictures and make epistemic use of lived experiences to shift and transform our imaginations by offering insights into the lives of others. I argue that such approaches offer more effective means of opening deeply held beliefs up to critical scrutiny and possible revision than approaches that seek simply to state the truth of contrary beliefs.

Deeply Held Beliefs

It is compelling to think that argument can be transformative, that it can work in the service of social justice, that we can, if you like, change the world through argument. Indeed, many of us who teach and write about argument and critical thinking not only hope for transformative outcomes, but also tell our students that they are possible. Some of us have written to that effect:

It is a good reflection of the importance of the skills you are developing that those in power sometimes fear the effects of those who can think critically about moral, social, economic and political issues. The ability to think critically, then, is essential if one is to function properly in one’s role as a citizen. (Bowell and Kemp 2015, p. 6)

While I don’t reject these claims outright, I have come to the view that what it takes to think critically and to experience and interact with the world in a way that can be transformative is a good deal more challenging and complex than standard critical thinking textbooks and courses may lead us, and more importantly, those who read them, to believe. We have entered an era of post-factual public discourse in which experts are spurned—see, for instance, the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign and its ongoing aftermath in the UK, or the 2016 US and 2017 UK election campaigns. Lies and misrepresentations of the facts are ignored even when they are demonstrated to be such. It seems to me crucial therefore that we come up with ways to encourage intellectually responsible participation in socio-political discourses and in democracy more generally.

Of course, there is emotional and social comfort in holding onto beliefs shared by those around us and with whom we regularly interact. If friends, both actual and digital, neighbours, family and colleagues express and share the view that migrants are stealing jobs, pushing wages down, engage in crime and terrorist acts, and so on, then that position is entrenched in our social interactions and understanding of the world; we thus take an emotional and social risk if we attempt to challenge that view. Moreover, our beliefs and opinions are reinforced in the echo chambers of our social media feeds. These echo chambers shelter us from socio-cultural and political difference; their digital (dis)locatedness shields us from an encounter with the distant other, who is demonised in the absence of any challenge to our prejudices and fears that could be gained from the experience of an actual, embodied, encounter. As Plato reminded us, the illusions of the cave offer more comfort than the confrontations of reality. Lorraine Code’s Aristotelian characterisation of the intellectually virtuous person shows the epistemic flaws inherent in our tendency to remain within the shelter of the cave.

The intellectually virtuous person […] is one who finds value in knowing and understanding how things really are. S/he resists the temptation to live with partial explanations where fuller ones are attainable, the temptation to live in fantasy or in a world of dreams or illusion, considering it better to know, despite the tempting comfort and complacency that a life of fantasy or illusion (or well-tinged with fantasy or illusion) can offer. (Code 1984, p. 44)

Although critical thinking pedagogy does often emphasise the need for a properly critical thinker to be willing (and able) to hold up their own beliefs to critical analysis and scrutiny, and be prepared to modify or relinquish them in the face of appropriate evidence, it is has been recognised that the type of critical thinking instruction usually offered at first-year level in universities frequently does not lead to these outcomes for learners. Paul (1992) uses the term “strong sense critical thinking” to refer to a level of criticality at which a person is able to apply the processes and principles of argumentation assessment to their own beliefs and commitments, particularly towards their own deeply held beliefs, and to remove any bias towards their own beliefs, turning critical thinking inwards, if you will. Taking critical thinking to this level is important if it is to become a real-life skill and to equip us to participate in our communities in the ways we hope (and tell students) it will, that is if it is properly to become an aspect of our ability to reason practically.

It seems there are no necessary or sufficient conditions for a belief’s being deeply held (Kingsbury and Bowell 2016). Deeply held beliefs are acquired in various ways, and their content is diverse. Some markers may be present, but are not necessarily. Thus a deeply held belief may be held passionately and defended dogmatically, and it may play a fundamental role in the way we represent the world to ourselves. It can form part of our symbolic framework and of our ways of being in the world and with others, influencing our social and political actions. By way of example, all and any of the following beliefs could be candidates for deeply held status:

  • This building is not about to fall down.

  • Here is a hand.

  • Jesus died for our sins.

  • Women are equal to men in all respects.

  • Immigration is a threat to our way of life.

  • Human activity is not a principal cause of climate change.

  • The left is soft on terrorism.

  • Conservatives are heartless and don’t care about social inequality.

We are often emotionally attached to our deeply held beliefs. This may be because of the way they have been acquired and reinforced via our upbringing and by people who have been influential in our lives—parents and other family members, teachers, religious and cultural leaders, our social or professional peers, or because they have been formed on the basis of our own lived experiences that serve consistently to reinforce them. They are part of the mythology that provides the narrative environment within which our cognitive and affective development takes place (Wittgenstein 1969, §s95, 97). Thus, we often feel invested in such beliefs, and they form part of our identity. Unsurprisingly, given the ways in which they tend to be acquired and our unwillingness to subject them to critical scrutiny, deeply held beliefs are prone to prejudice, implicit bias, confirmation bias, and stereotypes. They are also easily manipulated, since we are often unaware that we have them. Our tendency to cling tightly to them, coupled with an unwillingness or inability to subject them to reflection, demonstrates a lack of open-mindedness, that is to say, a resistance to different points of view, and, consequently, a resistance to change.

My experience as a critical thinking teacher is that it is difficult to bring students to a place where they are able and willing to reflect critically on their own beliefs. The difficulty involves broader issues than critical thinking pedagogy itself. It is partly a question of the right motivation, partly of students’ understandings and expectations of themselves as learners. In a small research project by Goldberg et al. (2015), students who had taken our first-year, one-semester critical thinking course were interviewed about the extent to which their thinking had become more critical after having completed the course. They were then asked about the extent to which their reflection on their own deeply held beliefs had become more critical. This question was explored in more depth by setting up conversations with the interviewer in which they were encouraged to use critical thinking skills to reflect on and defend their own deeply held beliefs. The result was that, overwhelmingly, participants thought they had become more critical, yet very few were able or willing to reflect critically, properly speaking, on their own beliefs. They tended to defend their beliefs fallaciously, often with appeals to tradition or employing the naturalistic fallacy. This result was troubling, of course. It seemed to indicate that our course (and textbook) failed in its task to help students to develop this kind of practical wisdom. More profoundly, in light of these results, the expectation that transforming deeply held beliefs can be achieved via standard critical thinking methods and approaches appears unreasonable and naive. Several participants talked about beliefs that they had “imbibed with their mother’s milk”, i.e. beliefs that formed part of the framework from within which they thought about and sought to understand the world. In short, such beliefs constituted part of the ethos with which they engaged with the world and with others—they were their habitus.Footnote 1 These kinds of admissions make clear that the genealogy of certain of our deeply held beliefs, involving family and other influential figures in our early lives, are often so embedded in our ways of being that they go unremarked and unreflected upon. Thus, we may be inclined to defend such notions emotionally when challenged—they are associated with our relation to people we love, respect and admire. They form part of our intimate identity.

Argument and Emotion

In philosophy generally, and in argumentation theory more specifically, as a rule, emotion and identity are considered out of place in good reasoning; indeed, emotion (bad) is usually represented as juxtaposed to reason (good). In argumentation theory, we see a family of these juxtapositions: mythos versus logos, emotion versus reason, rhetoric versus argument, convincing versus persuading (as others have noted, these oppositions are also conceived of along gendered lines, e.g. Lloyd 1984; Jaggar 1989; Gilbert 2004; Linker 2015). Recently, however, theorists such as Michael Gilbert and Maureen Linker have recognised and argued for the legitimacy of emotion within reasoning and argument, and against the standard conception of emotion as opposed to reason and a hindrance to good reasoning. On such a view, emotion is considered a legitimate part of reasoning rather than a response that replaces reason. So, for example, while on the one hand, fear and anger can be stoked to an extent that reflective assessment is difficult and judgement is clouded, on the other, fear and anger can be warranted and can have a role to play within effective practical reasoning. As Linker (2015, pp. 71–72) notes, for example, indignation plays an important and justified role in our responses to social injustices. Indeed, anger or indignation is often the rational response to social realities in such cases, and can be a trigger for taking appropriate actions or changing the way we think about the world and about others. For Gilbert (2004), when evaluating someone’s reasoning or making a judgement call on their route to a particular conclusion, emotion is just one of several factors that it is rational to consider.

As I have acknowledged, there is some truth in the traditional view that emotion can impede clear and productive reflection and judgement. The affective aspects of our cognitive schema also mean that our deeply held beliefs can be prey to confirmation bias. Linker’s example makes the problem clear: imagine two young children learning the concept “dog”, but from within different cognitive schema. One child grows up in a family of dog lovers. She experiences a great deal of contact with dogs, dogs are talked about positively, and her experiences of dogs are the main happy ones. Once she has grasped the concept “dog”, that is, once she is able to distinguish dogs from all the other, non-dog, things she encounters, and can discern relevant similarities between the dog things—her understanding of dogs, reinforced by her experiences and the behaviour of her family, is of something positive. The other child grows up in a family in which one (or more) of the adults have had a traumatic experience with dogs, perhaps having been attacked as a child. While she acquires the concept and is able to use it properly, distinguishing dog things from non-dogs and so on, her experience of dogs and all that she learns about dogs develop within a negative cognitive schema; she comes to understand dogs as a negative thing. Her beliefs about dogs—that they are frightening and to be avoided, say, have been reinforced by her family and her upbringing. In order to modify her understanding of dogs, she would need to be exposed to dogs in more favourable circumstances, which would, ideally, result in more positive experiences. These new experiences provide opportunities for her to revise her long-standing beliefs that dogs are dangerous and to be avoided (Linker 2015, pp. 36–38).

This example can be applied to the sorts of deeply held beliefs that someone may form and hold about socio-political issues. Someone whose upbringing and broader social contacts engender and reinforce an understanding of people from a different background—people who are a different race or ethnicity, have different religious beliefs, are from a different social class, are richer or poorer, are disabled, whose sexuality is different—as people to be feared and mistrusted will likely form negative deeply held beliefs. They may well be emotionally attached to those beliefs, which are confirmed by their experiences and are understood within the cognitive framework of their upbringing. By contrast, someone whose upbringing and broader social contacts are characterized by positive exposure to difference is less likely to develop the same sort of fears toward others. Someone raised in a community in which the variety of people and ways of living are just part of everyday life will be less inclined in general to think in terms of “us” and “the others”. Without a framework of “us” and “them” already in place, the idea of treating individuals as representatives of groups would likely be foreign, even incomprehensible. It seems probable that deeply held beliefs such as these, which clearly guide our social interactions, are not held consciously. They play a guiding role in the way we live our lives, but they are not something we call to mind on a regular basis; to the contrary, we are likely first aware of them when they are called into question or become the subject of reflection in some other way, just as the assumptions that underpin our interactions with the physical world, such as “the building is not about to fall down”, go unnoticed and unchallenged in the normal course of our lives. They only come to the fore when in unusual situations, such as, in this case, in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake.

There are, then, several features that may be displayed by deeply held beliefs that make us less likely to hold them up to critical scrutiny so that inconsistencies and relevant evidence can be brought to light. Because they are so much a part of our way of thinking about and experiencing the world, revising them might cause reverberations throughout the web of our beliefs and practices. Since they are formed within a particular, enduring framework, they are often prey to confirmation bias, to being reinforced by the shared beliefs of our communities and by our experiences within that cognitive schema, even in the face of evidence that disconfirms them. As a consequence, when we encounter challenges to our deeply held beliefs, and when we question those of others, we often do so in a less than open-minded way, engaging in the call and response of adversarial assertion and denial, rather than actually listening to what others are saying.

Maureen Linker’s work on intellectual empathy offers a starting point for a way out of this impasse for argumentation and for critical thinking pedagogy. In her book, Intellectual Empathy: Critical Thinking for Social Justice (2015), she draws on her own practice as an educator negotiating methods for effective and potentially transformative discussions of socially divisive issues often taking place across often extensive social, cultural and political difference.Footnote 2 As her case studies demonstrate, when critical thinking is performed in the way that Linker argues for, it manifests traits and practices that realise intellectual responsibility: it is virtuous inquiry. Whereas the adversarial practice of argument in which we fire contesting facts at one another or question each other’s moral or intellectual capacity does not lead to the opening of hearts and minds, what Linker calls “intellectual empathy”, which is the soul and substance of her approach, has both cognitive and affective appeal. Linker characterises intellectual empathy thus:

Intellectual empathy, then, assumes that reason and understanding must be supplemented with emotion and experience so that we can know in the fullest possible sense. This means knowing about ourselves and knowing as much as we can about other people’s circumstances, particularly people whose circumstances are different from our own. In this way, intellectual empathy is not a psychological prescription for changing individual beliefs. It is a means of examining both the wide scope of social institutions and social inequality and the narrow scope of our own beliefs. When we employ intellectual empathy in our reasoning about social differences, we are not so much interested in gathering information about people and their respective beliefs as we are in looking at situations people face through their eyes. (Linker 2015, p. 13)

Traits such as these are absolutely necessary for a fuller understanding of complex social issues. Argument that is disconnected from the reality of lived experiences, where social position and power relations are neglected, ignored or obscured, lacks the nuance that is the hallmark of deeper comprehension. When deeply held beliefs are radically different, or even directly opposed, there is often a failure to see anything in common and differences are foregrounded instead. Linker’s approach is thus in the first place to seek commonality.

She also points to the way in which many of the responses that we have in inquiry about social issues are both cognitive and affective, as is intellectual empathy itself. This contrasts with the traditional approach to argument and critical thinking (and standard critical thinking pedagogy), according to which emotion has no place in critical thinking and argumentation, but belongs rather to the preserve of rhetoric.

Asymmetric Reciprocity

In the remainder of this chapter, I want to consider how we might start to develop an understanding that takes proper account of the other; how we might come to be able to understand empathetically in a manner that does not undermine our ability to reason critically, but rather improves our criticality. But first I draw on the resources offered by Iris Marion Young’s notion of Asymmetrical Reciprocity to consider some of the limitations we face in working to understand each other empathetically across socio-cultural and political differences. I then draw on the resources offered by Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens’ Spinozistic picture of the social imaginary and the possibilities that offers for our coming to imagine different ways of being in the world and with others. These may be different ways in which the world is for others, or they may be different ways in which the world could be for us, and for others. That is, there are prospects here both for better understanding the realities of the lives of others as well as prospects for imagining different, and better, lives for ourselves with others.

Young (1997, p. 38) reminds us that an injunction to practice symmetrical reciprocity is common in ordinary moral practice. In the course of moral practices, we are often questioned or enjoined in the following ways:

  • Look at it from his position.

  • Try to walk in her shoes.

  • How would you like it if someone did that to you?

  • There but for the grace of God, go I.

Often these and similar propositions form the content of deeply held beliefs about behaving morally. Morality does seem to demand of us that we show respect to others in part by considering their standpoint, and doing so is a way of performing open-mindedness, humility and empathy. Empathy and reciprocity feature in our deeply held beliefs about how we should behave towards each other, beliefs that we could say are commonly part of a moral imaginary. Young doesn’t deny the role of empathy and reciprocity, but she does dispute the morphology of reciprocity, problematizing the extent to which it is really possible to imagine ourselves into the lived experiences of another. Learning from others’ experiences, she argues, is central to moral engagement (and to deliberative discourse in the context of democracies), but it is not achieved through the imaginative move of imagining oneself in the other’s position. Instead, we should seek to learn from them what it is like for them, rather than trying to imagine what it would/could be like for ourselves. So we should try to focus on a third-person perspective rather than slipping into a first-person perspective. We can’t imagine ourselves as others, only as other versions of ourselves and there is much in the literature on conceivability and possibility and on the phenomenon of imaginative resistance that supports Young’s position in this respect (e.g. Gendler 2000; MacKenzie 2006; Scarry 1998). So rather than trying to imagine ourselves into the position of the other, we should commit to learning as much as we can about the lived realities of other people from their own testimonial accounts of how they experience, negotiate and live their lives; how they live their gender, race, class, disability, sexuality, culture and religion. This requires that we listen properly and take seriously others’ testimony in order to learn about their lived experiences and about how it is to be them in this world.

For example, my husband is deaf. Together we negotiate the practical, moral and emotional tensions of his lived reality every day in our own relationship and interactions, and in those with others both within and outside of our immediate family. I have no real sense of what it is like to be him in his position, to experience the isolation and exclusion and frustrations that he does. Recently, I was temporarily deaf in one ear. For a short while I gained some insight into what it is like not to be able to hear properly, and I think it’s fair to say that my sympathy for his position expanded slightly (at least for a while), although I couldn’t legitimately claim to know deafness from his position or to have walked in his shoes. Rather, I have to take his word for it with respect to what it’s like for him to live as a deaf person. Thus, encountering and listening to the other are placed front and centre of attempting empathetically to understand and know the other properly.

Linker recounts an instance of productive encounter that occurred when she was leading a project for students who wanted to make some kind of positive contribution to the lives of the homeless in their area of Michigan. It was approaching winter, and the students assumed that homeless people would need mittens. They set out to collect mittens that could be donated to a local shelter, but Linker reminded them that they hadn’t contacted anyone to check that their assumption was correct. As it turned out, the shelter had plenty of warm winter clothing which had been donated by others who had reasoned in the same way as the students; what the shelter needed was help sorting the clothing into sizes, and so on. The students duly volunteered for that task, and in the process had the opportunity to visit the shelter and work there for the day, gaining the chance to learn directly about its programmes and the lives of its clients (Linker 2015, pp. 178–179).

Linker’s story illustrates the limitations of understanding others’ needs on the basis of our own perspective, as well as how direct encounter with the other offers a way of correcting and overcoming misunderstandings. But direct, embodied encounter is often not possible, which is where imagination can come into play. Young points to the ways in which different histories and positionalities bear on, and place limitations on, the ways in which we both experience the world and each other, and in which we interact with and try to understand each other. For example, all other things being equal, given my privileged and safe life as a professional in New Zealand, it is unlikely that I would experience what it is like to be so desperate to escape war or poverty, that I would abandon my home and my way of life, gather up my family and trek across dangerous terrain or use my life savings to buy passage on a crowded vessel that may or may not make it to safer shores. Moreover, unless I actively seek out opportunities for direct encounter with people who have had these kinds of experiences, such as becoming involved as a volunteer with an organisation that works with refugees, it is unlikely that I can come to know and understand the realities of their lives via direct encounter.

Young emphasises the need to listen across the distance of difference, recognising that while crossing boundaries can lead to productive understanding, we must still respect those boundaries. In striving to understand others, I never really transcend my own experience; I can never be out of my own skin, but I can learn something new, while acknowledging that there will always be conceptual residues and resistances to understanding despite overlaps in interests and understandings. So while there are commonalities that may form a starting point for transformative dialogue, we should attend to particularity and avoid eliding differences in background, life histories, lifestyles and positionalities. Young emphasises the importance of questions. Questioning demonstrates respect, acknowledges ignorance and demonstrates a desire to learn from others. Contrast this with argument which tends to proceed by the making of assertions rather than the posing of questions. Dialogue that recognises the asymmetry of others in this way offers two possibilities for extending and deepening our understanding and knowledge: it enables me better to understand myself because my own assumptions and point of view become relativized when positioned reflectively in relation to those of others. It enables me better to understand others, because I put myself in a position where I can learn how their lives are and how the world is for them.

Asymmetric reciprocity requires sympathetic imagining, a trying to see what it is like for them, while acknowledging that one does so from within the limits of one’s own positionalities. Sympathetic imagining can offer a means of extending our third-person perspective on the lives and experiences of others. The experience of properly encountering others often involves attentively listening to and engaging with their stories. Narratives, both real and fictional, offer a way of overcoming imaginative resistance.

Thus far I have considered the way in which asymmetric reciprocity might be performed through encounter with the real-life stories of others. In the remainder of the paper, I want to extend that thinking by drawing on the resources of the idea of the social imaginary to consider a way in which engaging critically with fictions can also offer a way of coming to understand other ways of being in the world and with others. I also want to highlight the role of lived experiences in (re)shaping social imaginaries, creating new, and better, fictions.

Re-imagining the (Social) World: The Imaginary

An imaginary is a loosely connected set of images embedded in social practices, or throughout texts. It consists of

imaginary forms that are constitutive of our experience of the world, bearers of effective significance, the means by which we not only think, but feel our way around the world (Gatens and Lloyd 1999, p. 111)

It can serve as a device for changing perceptions and understandings of others’ experiences and ways of being in the world. Our socially shared fictions play a constitutive role in binding a group of individuals together; they are constitutive of our identities. Thus, the fictions of which our imaginary is comprised maintain and create a way of life. Despite some of the connotations associated with the term in its standard use and with the notion of a fiction, the imaginary is not illusory. Rather, the central tenet of the concept of the imaginary is that the imagination is both structured by and includes the symbolic. This symbolic framework includes socio-cultural and political representations, including stereotypes and biases, and our deeply held beliefs are part of those representations. It thus determines social and political action and the ways we are perceived and perceive others. The world we encounter comes to us always already represented. It has an imaginary form that yields the salience and significance that the world has for us. The imaginary, then, is our way of making cognitive and affective sense of the world.

These sense-making thought patterns are perspectival and embodied, and thus shaped and potentially altered by our experiences and our positionalities. As Gatens and Lloyd (1999, p. 25) explain, experiencing something via a different image or form can give rise to a different mode of feeling and a different response. A simple example is provided by Spinoza: a horse’s hoof prints in the sand lead a soldier to think of horsemen and of war, a farmer of ploughs and fields. The meaning and salience we attribute to our experiences and to the aspects of the world with which we interact is a consequence of the social and cultural mediation of our responses. Thus, in our encounters with each other, salience is often afforded to difference—to bodies that look different, be they black, pregnant, or with a disability, to bodies that sound different by dint of accent or language, to lives that are lived in ways that differ from ours.

The resources of the idea of the imaginary offer transformative potential because they offer the possibility of dislodging false and misleading representations, creatively replacing them with better ones, thus creating images that open up alternative ways of being in the world. For instance, while we cannot modify damaging representations of women simply by claiming they are false or by asserting their negation (women can reason, women can carry heavy loads), if the way women are imagined can be changed, responses to female bodies open up to the potential for change.

Changes might be brought about by the experience of concrete, embodied examples of alternatives to the status quo. For instance, I was recently involved in interviewing young women who were candidates for scholarships for refugee daughters (young women who are either refugees themselves or the daughters thereof). A young Muslim woman, originally from Afghanistan, talked about her ambition to be a pilot. She had seen media coverage of a recent flight from Brunei to Saudi Arabia on which the entire flight crew were women. The stereotype-challenging images of these women had enabled her to imagine the possibility of a career as a pilot for herself. In similar vein, the courageous Saudi women who, first, dare to drive cars themselves and then, even more transgressively, film themselves doing so and upload the videos to the internet, offer new, alternative memes—alternative imaginary forms—that shift thinking about what women can do, and should not be prevented from doing. While they show the far-from-normal, they offer possibilities for what could become normalised. To reinforce the point, as we go to press, King Salman has issued a decree permitting driver’s licences to be issued to women and allowing women to drive without a male guardian present.

Stories and other texts—films, plays, visual art, songs—also carry socio-cultural transformative potential through their ability to bring about shifts in the social imaginary by offering glimpses of different lives and ways of being, be they actual lives of others that we better understand through those stories and images or possibilities manifested via fictional narratives. Take Virginia Woolf’s example of the “angel in the house” that appears in her essay “Professions for Women” (cited in Lloyd 1998, p. 170). The angel is a phantom that visits as she writes; a fiction governing the interactions between men and women. The angel is sympathetic, charming, utterly unselfish and self-sacrificing. She takes the leg of the chicken, she sits in the draft. Woolf’s imagery enables us to recognise something that is embedded, but not clearly visible, in our social practices. The fiction brings it to light, enabling us to see it more clearly, but rather than stating these truths as such, it shows them, by making certain aspects of the scenario pertinent and salient to us, precipitating a process of coming to see and better to understand. Moreover, stories and images such as these evoke affective reactions—Woolf’s readers feel justified anger or irritation (or resignation?) as they first encounter and then recognise these aspects of our social practices. The recognition then prompts cognitive responses: it’s wrong that women are expected, and expect themselves, to make these sacrifices. Finally, on the basis of such reflections, we can eventually move towards changing such practices.

The narratives and characters in Loach’s (2016) film about living with unemployment and negotiating the benefits system, I Daniel Blake, play a similar role of first making certain truths perspicuous by evoking emotional responses and then triggering a better understanding of lives such as these. The film shows what it is like to be a mother trying to bring up two children on her own in a city to which she has been relocated by the benefits agency and where she knows no one; or a widower who has a chronic health condition that is deemed insufficiently severe to prevent him from working, but who cannot find a job in part because he isn’t healthy enough to work. The portrayals dislodge the fiction of the lazy, feckless, benefits scrounger who wants something for nothing and is not deserving of our empathy or our care and consideration. When viewing the film, we get a sense of the frustration, indignity and eventual despair that is experienced by its characters. The shame of the mother caught eating baked beans straight from the can at the food bank to assuage the hunger that has built up from foregoing meals to give her children all the food she can afford is made so perspicuous through image and narrative that we feel a justified, a righteous, anger at the way she is treated by a state and a system that should be helping and supporting her. Of course, a text won’t affect every viewer or reader in the same way and, indeed, I, Daniel Blake will have had none of these effects on any number of viewers. But for some, those who may have tended to think of benefit claimants not as individual humans with similarities to themselves, the narrative, characters and images can provide a means by which it is possible to reimagine benefit claimants and dislodge the grip of stereotypes and unconscious biases, replacing their (mis)understandings with a conception of people as actual individuals with life histories, relationships, interests, loves and hates not dissimilar to their own. By depicting the characters as individuals—by filling them out—the film rehumanises them, giving the audience the opportunity to imagine the world in the ways it really is for them and thus to see and come to understand the reality of the lives depicted more clearly. Moreover, in gaining this clarity of vision and understanding, and reacting with anger, the viewer may be moved to some kind of action aimed at improving people’s lives, or to working for socio-political change.

Stories, then, provide us with a way into understanding the realities of the lives of others and can work to modify and change our imaginaries. Furthermore, we can become part of stories. Stories help us to imagine ourselves in situations similar to those depicted, and energise our non-cognitive responses in ways that can be productive within contexts involving not just the affective, but also reason and judgement. Stories are a means of changing minds in terms of how we come to understand the world and others, as well as in terms of the way we then come to make judgements about them. They can also offer up possibilities for coming to imagine different ways of being in the world and with others.

In Gatens’ and Lloyd’s development of the Spinozistic idea of the imaginary, we can find the resources for a harmonising of emotion and argument. Rational reflection on the imaginary is possible. The appropriateness of images can be challenged and fictions can be changed or replaced by better fictions. This process is not one of checking fictions against the real, but rather of seeing if the world and subject can bear this signification. Through that assessment, we gain the opportunity to confront “different ways of inhabiting our world and living affectively and effectively within it” (Gatens and Lloyd 1999, p. 120).

The challenge is not to transcend them [fictions], but to use reasons to see through, improve and replace, destructive, oppressive fictions with others judged better able to sustain individual and collective conatus. (Lloyd 1998, p. 166)

Reason and imagination, then, are not conceived of as related via an ascending hierarchy as in Plato’s account, according to which there is epistemic and metaphysical ascent from the world of appearances to the world of forms. Instead, imagination is seen as coexisting with reason to generate unified pictures of the world. If fictions structure both individual behaviour and social practices, then, argues Lloyd, identifying and confronting them is the core of education. It is this critical intelligence that serves as the critical element of proper critical thinking, schooling both the imagination and our ability to reason so as not to allow fictions to lead us astray. While one of Spinoza’s own targets was religious superstition, the contemporary challenge lies in confronting the fictions perpetuated by all manner of ideologies that influence deeply held beliefs and the ways in which we conduct ourselves and our relationships with others. In particular, genuinely fake news stories, as distinct from ones that we simply disagree with or wish were not true, are concocted specifically to discredit the opposition and deliberately mislead the audience, rendering common ground utterly impossible.

In Practice

I end this essay with a brief discussion of how these ideas might translate in an educational context. A recent article in the New York Times offers a case study of how a teacher might successfully negotiate a situation in which learners’ beliefs on a topic that is being studied are deeply held, yet false (Harmon 2017). A science teacher in Wellston, Ohio, found that almost his entire class of 17 senior students in biology were climate change sceptics. Wellston is a coal-mining district, and many of the students come from families in which parents, uncles and other relatives, friends and neighbours had lost jobs in the mines. The students’ deeply held beliefs that the emissions from burning coal and other fossil fuels were not causally responsible for climate change had been formed in the environments of their families and their communities. At first, the teacher used scientific evidence to demonstrate the falsity of the students’ beliefs, but loyalty to family meant that their affective response was stronger than any cognitive response elicited by the data and other evidence they were shown. They felt that it would be disloyal to distance themselves from or question the consensus opinion of their upbringing. Realising the source and role of the students’ deeply held beliefs, the teacher switched from trying to work directly against those beliefs by disproving them with statistical evidence. Instead, he appealed to their lived experience of the local climate, first as the winter produced fewer snow days and the spring brought floods. He then reinforced that by creating a new lived experience for his students, taking them to the woods close to the school where they observed the destructive effects of an invasive insect that used to die off in the winter but now survives because of the warmer weather. By recognising and acknowledging the emotional weight of the students’ deeply held beliefs about climate change and their suspicion toward scientists and the evidence they produce, the teacher found a way to disrupt those beliefs, not by exposing them to yet more statistical evidence, as though they might eventually bow to authority under its weight, but rather by enabling them directly to experience the effects of climate change in their immediate environment.

I emphasised earlier the value of narrative and fictional characters in enabling people to encounter the realities of lives other than their own and in dislodging misleading fictions about the lives of others and replacing them with more faithful representations. In the tertiary education sector, some teachers are using story worlds and games to provide digitally enhanced experiential learning that appeals to and engages learners who have grown up and have their habitus in digital spaces. A story world might be built around a narrative involving complex social or environmental situations that encourage critical enquiry and working towards practical and policy solutions. A story world can involve a fictional community in which learners take on roles and become characters within the story world. Augmented and virtual reality tools offer the possibility for digitally (re)creating environments that resemble real worlds, giving students a richer experiential learning environment that promotes both a cognitive and an affective response. Learning about environmental politics and activism, for example, could be enhanced if, through the use of augmented reality tools, learners could be immersed within the communities and worlds of the Dakota Access Pipeline activists and the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

I have argued that transformational learning experiences that involve open-mindedness with respect to one’s own shibboleths require more than developing good reasoning skills and dispositions; they require acknowledgement that deeply held beliefs can be motivated by emotional responses that are not unjustified, and that our affective responses to certain situations can, themselves, be reasonable responses. In order better to make space for emotion as part and parcel of transformative social enquiry and critique in the educational context, it seems to me that we should be offering learners more opportunities for encounter with the other, for experiential and immersive learning that both amplifies and challenges the theoretical approach, while calling into question some of the received attitudes and assumptions produced and disseminated by media and advertizing. Students studying economics, for instance, can complement their theoretical studies by being confronted first hand with the negative consequences of the theory’s application, say, by meeting and talking to laid-off factory workers, whose jobs were sent overseas to low-wage countries. Students learning about social policy could be well served as learners if given the opportunity to encounter eventual beneficiaries (or victims) of policy, learning about the effects it has had for them, and so forth.

While we should indeed remain serious about facts and about what’s true and what’s not, this moment of post-truth—and let’s work as educators, scholars and activists to ensure that it is just a moment—requires us also to take affective responses as seriously as cognitive ones, and to find ways to elicit new imaginative responses that confront misrepresentation, dissembling and lies.