ABSTRACT
There is a will to foster creativity and its close cousin, imagination, which is shared by industry, government and others concerned with the quality of contributions citizens make to the future. Ricoeur draws a distinction between 'reproductive' imagination, which relies on memory and mimesis, and 'productive' imagination, which is generative. Ricoeur's point is that reproductive forms of imagination tend to be less illuminating in terms of understanding human action, agency and creativity because they merely reproduce the perceived world. Ricoeur's theory offers a new way of putting the problem. Instead of approaching the issue of the imagination through perception, and asking if and how it passes from perception to image, his theory invites people to relate imagination to a use of language. Ricoeur argues that the function of metaphors is equivalent to the function of models in science. Ricoeur argues that narrative, like metaphor and models, is a case of semantic innovation.
