 The use of the word “resistance” in “imaginative resistance” has been criticized for privileging one of the rival explanations of imaginative resistance over the others. Three main rival explanations of imaginative resistance have been provided thus far: the Cantian, the Wontian, and the Eliminativist (Gendler 2006 coined the first two terms; Gendler and Liao 2016 the third one). Eliminativists deny that the phenomenon exists outside philosophers’ carefully constructed vignettes. The remaining camps, while accepting the existence of the phenomenon, present competing explanations of it. Cantians claim that imaginative resistance occurs when we can’t engage in the prompted imaginative activity. Wontians, by contrast take the phenomenon to involve unwillingness (rather than inability) to engage on the part of the reader or the audience. Cantians and eliminativists have been critical of the use of the word “resistance” because the term itself seems to privilege the Wontian explanation. Even though some philosophers choose to use “imaginative failure” instead of “imaginative resistance”, the replacement term has not stuck—after all, this entry itself is titled “imaginative resistance” (see Stock 2005, Brock 2012, Stear 2015, Tooming 2018). With the acknowledgment that “imaginative resistance” is an umbrella term for the phenomenon that some prefer to explain not in terms of resistance but inability, let’s have a closer look at competing explanations of imaginative resistance. 