Productive and practical imagination : what does productive imagination produce?

When philosophers use the concept of production, what exactly do they mean? Production comes from the Latin pro-ducere, to bring forth or yield, and by extension to bring forward, to bring to light, to show. The carpenter who produces a chair gives rise to a thing that was not there, while the lawyer who produces a document before a judge or a jury as evidence to substantiate a claim in court exhibits something that was there, potentially available for everybody. In many ways production overlaps with the Greek poiein. Typically, we lean toward the model of the carpenter rather than of the lawyer and use it to intend a making, a manufacturing, as we refer to the world of technê. If we think of the Aristotelian tripartition of activities, unlike thinking and acting production or poiêsis generates products, independently existing things. Our activity is heterodirected and transitive, that is, causal and instrumental in bringing them about, and is extinguished in the product, to use Marx’s words. As such, it is an incomplete process that draws its meaning and worth from its finished product. Unlike thinking and acting where subject and end of the activity coincide, this process is incomplete because it involves time and effort, and beginning and end of the activity fall as under in two different beings, producer and produced.