This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Rob Hopkins’ recent book: The Profile of Imagining (Oxford University Press, 2024). On Monday, we began with an introduction from Rob. Commentaries and replies are running Tuesday through Thursday.
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Commentary from Joshua Myers
In this clear, thoughtful, and sharply written book, Hopkins presents a comprehensive account of the nature, content, and phenomenology of sensory imagining that is inspired by Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Ryle.
One of the core claims of this account is that, unlike what we perceive, what we imagine cannot overflow our awareness and is therefore not amenable to observation. Consider what it is like to perceive an apple. The apple seems to have a nature that is open to investigation. For example, you might be surprised to turn the apple around and find a bruise on the other side. The objects of perception overflow our awareness of them and, as a result, we can extend our awareness of them by observation. By contrast, when you imagine an apple, there is no aspect of the imagined apple that you are not aware of. If you imagine rotating the apple to reveal a bruise on the other side, then either you already imagined the bruise before rotating it, or you didn’t, in which case there was no pre-existing bruise to discover. Either way, you will not be surprised by the bruise. As a result, you cannot extend your awareness of imagined objects by observation.
A large portion of the book is dedicated to defending this contrast between perception and imagination. I will focus on just one thread which comes out in Chapter 7 while investigating how imagination can yield knowledge about the actual world.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Rob Hopkins’ recent book: The Profile of Imagining (Oxford University Press, 2024). Yesterday we began with an introduction from Rob. Commentaries and replies follow today through Thursday.
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Commentary from Seth Goldwasser
Robert Hopkins’s The Profile of Imagining articulates with great clarity and defends with sprezzatura a new vision of sensory imagining. I love this book. And I find much to like about Hopkins’s profiling account of sensory imagining, as I defend the claim that imagination in general is an agential power, namely, a skill (Goldwasser 2024). I hope to be the Tommy Oliver to Hopkins’s Jason Lee Scott.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Rob Hopkins’ recent book: The Profile of Imagining (Oxford University Press, 2024). Today we begin with an introduction from Rob. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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What is sensory imagining? What is it to visualize rain falling on a city street, to summon the way the downpour suppresses the noise of the traffic, to imagine the distinctive odour coming off sun-warmed tarmac when wet? Most answers, whether from philosophers or psychologists, centre on the idea that sensory imagining is like sensing (perceiving), approximating both its phenomenology and its functional role. In The Profile of Imagining, I take a different line. The differences between imagining and perceiving, both phenomenological and functional, are far more striking than the similarities. Overall, sensory imagining is closer to thinking than perceiving. True, imagining something, unlike thinking about it, may capture what it would be like to perceive it. But capturing phenomenology need not involve reproducing it; and need not result in a state with a functional profile akin to that of the target. The book sets out an alternative explanation of this and other features that imagining displays.
Read MoreA post by Uku Tooming, Roomet Jakapi, Riin Sirkel, and Toomas Lott
We recently received a grant from the Estonian Research Council for a five-year research project titled “Imagination in Cognition: Contemporary and Ancient Perspectives.” Our team consists of four members: Uku Tooming and Roomet Jakapi specialize in contemporary approaches to imagination and related phenomena, while Riin Sirkel and Toomas Lott are experts in Ancient Greek philosophy, Uku Tooming is the primary investigator of the project.
In this blog post, we will provide a brief overview of our main research questions and the way in which we plan to approach them.
Read MoreA post by Alfredo Vernazzani
The imagination has long been regarded with ambivalence in science and philosophy. In Renaissance, and later until the 18th century, it was even conjectured that it could alter the course of normal biological development, and generate monsters. Scientists such as the physician Fienus (1608), and philosophers like Malebranche (1660/1871) speculated that the mother’s imagination could have such deep effects as to alter the fetus’ development, a doctrine called by its opponents ‘imaginationism’ (Dürbeck 1998). Whereas imaginationism populates the Wunderkammer of the history of science, contemporary philosophers wrestle with epistemic hurdles regarding the uses of the imagination (e.g. Myers 2023).
Recourse to the imagination, for example in thought experiments, can lead to uncertain philosophical speculations, give us the illusion of epistemic insight, or paralyze reflection into the labyrinths of phantasy. Arguably, the mistrust towards the imagination is at least partially fueled by its apparent freedom. Let me make a comparison with another constructive process, such as visual perception. To assemble visual representations of our surroundings, the visual system operates under several constraints, such as feature-object binding (Matthen 2005; Vernazzani 2022), Gestalt principles (Koffka 1936; Wagemans et al. 2015), and so on. But the imagination doesn’t operate in the same way, for we seem to be able to imagine whatever we want. In this respect, Hume’s words seem particularly apposite: “[n]othing is more free than the imagination of man” (1748/2009, p. 39). Hence the question: under what conditions does the exercise of the imagination improve our epistemic standing?
Read MoreA post by Honey Jernquist
Where is your imagination? Let’s point at it — right now — with your index finger.
Really commit to it, and sit with it, pointing out that place or spot, somewhere on your inside, where you site that feeling, that flicker: imagination.
Let’s talk about it.
I’ll tell you where I feel my imagination — mostly right in the center of my head, dancing with some kind of rippling, zippy, zappy, neuro-electrical netting, coursing through my weird what-am-I-doing-here flesh body — whoa, the Me-ness! Whoa the You-ness! Whoa, the inside! Whoa, the outside!
But don’t think about it too hard.
Run with it!
Have fun with it!
There’s a quasi-visual quality about it, yes, but it’s more nuanced than that.
Read MoreA post by Merel Semeijn
“Should we put Santa Claus on the ‘naughty list’?” Last Christmas, Nursery World (a childcare magazine) asked this question to an interdisciplinary panel, including James Mahon, a philosopher of deception. Mahon’s answer was a clear “yes”:
Santa Claus is not a fictional character. Santa Claus is a lie character. There’s an important difference. Harry Potter is a fictional character. Children are not supposed to believe that Harry Potter exists. But children are supposed to believe Santa Claus exists.
Lying, for Mahon, is naughty, making Christmas a “tainted holiday”. He urges adults to stop lying to children, and to turn Santa into a fictional character instead.
I partly agree with Mahon. He is right to correct anyone who mistakenly categorizes Santa as a fictional character. Hark now, however… Santa is also not a ‘lie character’. Santa is a ‘hoax character’!
Read MoreA post by Neil Van Leeuwen
One of the most enduring sources of resistance to Kendall Walton’s now classic (1990) Mimesis as Make-Believe is his notion of “quasi-emotion.”
Case in point: just last week I received an email from a graduate student who had presented on Walton on quasi-emotions at a conference and had found the audience “quite unsympathetic.”
Walton tells us, to give the background, that quasi-fear is not the same thing as real fear. Giving us the example of Charles “fearing” the blob that seems to come towards him in the movie theater, Walton claims that the emotional state (let that be a neutral term) that Charles is in is not actual fear (like what you might feel when an aggressive Rottweiler growls at you) but quasi-fear. What’s that? Well, it’s a sort of make-believe fear that makes it fictionally but not actually the case that you are afraid of whatever (in the fiction) is causing it.
And this idea is meant to generalize to the many emotional states people have in response to fiction: the “sadness” I feel in response to Anna Karenina’s (fictional) death is quasi-sadness; the “anger” I feel at Uriah Heep’s manipulative schemes is quasi-anger; and so on.
Philosophical arguments aside, I think much resistance toward Walton’s notion of quasi-emotion stems from indignation. We cherish the emotional experiences we have in response to fiction so much that it feels almost like a dismissive insult to hear that they’re not “real” emotions. I wept and wept when Little Nell died! How dare Walton tell me my sadness wasn’t real!
The point of this blog is to revisit that reaction and to say that, in assessing the value of Walton’s view of emotional states people have in response to fiction, it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater (if it is bathwater, that is).
Read MoreA post by Adriana Alcaraz Sánchez
We tend to say that someone who is daydreaming is distracted, thinking about something else, absorbed in their own musings. We use the term to characterise the experience of being absorbed in our own (inner) world. But what is daydreaming exactly?
The experience of daydreaming has been extensively addressed in the psychological literature. Yet, more traditional research in this area has largely conflated daydreaming with “mind wandering” and both terms have been used to denote episodes of task-unrelated thought (Klinger, 2008; Singer, 1975). In the more traditional sense, daydreaming is understood similarly to our common-sense definition—as episodes of distraction. Given this conflation, some authors have attempted to change this trend by emphasising the distinctive features of daydreaming that make it different from mind wandering, such as its imagistic nature as well as its more agential character and purpose (Dorsch, 2015; Newby-Clark & Thavendran, 2018).
More relevant to the purposes of this piece, other authors have argued that daydreaming is not like any other kind of waking imagination (including any form of visualisation, planning, or supposition), but that it is more akin to nighttime dreaming. According to these authors, daydreams, like dreams, involve a sense of being in an imagined world—an “imaginative immersive experience” (Lawson & Thompson, 2024). Some have noted the hybrid nature of daydreaming as an experience that “lies between wakefulness and sleep. It has one foot in the actual world and another foot in the dream world” (Geniusas, 2023:49). Similarly, dreams have also been regarded as particularly intensified and immersive imaginative experiences (Windt, 2020).
One question arising from these views stressing the dream-like nature of daydreaming is: to what extent does daydreaming involve an experience of dreaming while awake? Here, I want to motivate a positive answer to this question by examining a relatively newfound phenomenon focus of recent interest in clinical psychology: the case of maladaptive daydreaming (MD; Somer, 2002).
Read MoreA post by Maria Fedorova
Classic psychedelics, such as LSD and psilocybin, are both mind-altering and mind-revealing agents. They sharpen one’s sensations, induce illusions and hallucinations, distort the perception of space and time, evoke intense emotions and cause changes to one’s sense of self. After a long hiatus, psychedelics are making a comeback. Part of the reason for this comeback is thanks to psychedelics’ potential to reduce symptoms of some mental health disorders, such as depression, anxiety and addiction. One plausible explanation for psychedelics’ therapeutic benefits is that they can facilitate a dramatic shift of perspective on one’s life. During a psychedelic experience, one can discover alternative ways of thinking about oneself, as well as one’s actions, values and relations to others (Letheby, 2021). But how do psychedelics help one achieve this shift in perspective? I argue below that experiential imagination plays a key role.
Read MoreA post by Sofia Pedrini
Imagine standing in Ikea, wondering if the table you’re looking at will fit through your front door. To answer this, you imagine, as realistically as possible, the table passing through the doorway (Dorsch 2016; Kind 2013; see Williamson 2016, Myers 2021 for similar examples). After careful imagining, you may come to believe that the table will indeed fit through the door. But does your imagining justify the belief that this is indeed the case in a way similar to perception? Can we rely on imagination to support our beliefs about the actual world?
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Bence Nanay’s recent book Mental Imagery (Oxford University Press, 2023). See here for an introduction from Bence. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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Commentary from Margherita Arcangeli
In 1969 Alan Richardson wrote, in the foreword of his Mental Imagery, that the time was ripe for a synthesis of the work done in psychology and philosophy on mental imagery and the aim of his book was “to serve as a guide to research in this field until a more comprehensive treatment becomes available”. Bence Nanay’s Mental Imagery offers us a new compass for navigating a prolific research topic that, despite its fluctuating fortunes, is still engaging the concurrent efforts of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists.
The book shows how mental imagery connects to almost all major mental capacities (perception, action, imagination, memory, desire, emotion). I necessarily have to narrow down the scope of my commentary by focusing on the relationship between mental imagery and imagination. I take it that although Bence frees mental imagery from imagination, the latter is, in his view, still dependent on the former. While I agree with the first claim, I am more sceptical about the second.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Bence Nanay’s recent book Mental Imagery (Oxford University Press, 2023). See here for an introduction from Bence. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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Commentary from Dominic Gregory
The current book develops a powerful and wide-ranging case for the importance of mental imagery throughout the mental realm, one that builds upon a distinctively non-phenomenological—and instead neurofunctional—conception of what mental imagery is most fruitfully understood to be. It is written in Bence’s characteristically straightforward but stylish prose, and it is packed with interesting arguments that are richly informed by relevant empirical work, arguments whose conclusions are brought to bear upon a wide variety of concerns.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Bence Nanay’s recent book Mental Imagery (Oxford University Press, 2023). See here for an introduction from Bence. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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Commentary from Daniel Munro
Bence Nanay’s Mental Imagery is a pleasure to read. It’s an impressively wide-ranging book, bringing together large swathes of research from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. It does so in a way that’s admirably accessible to readers of all stripes.
The book’s breadth isn’t just due to how much existing scholarship it brings together. It’s also because of the wide range of mental phenomena Bence discusses, all while aiming to convince us mental imagery is fundamental for understanding each.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Bence Nanay’s recent book Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience(Oxford University Press, 2023). Today we begin with an introduction from Bence. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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When I give a talk about mental imagery, I usually illustrate what mental imagery is by asking the audience to close their eyes and visualize an apple. That is without doubt one form of mental imagery, but it may give the wrong impression about how rife mental imagery is.
So I will go with a different way of introducing the phenomenon here: I’m writing this during a flight. And much of what I’m doing involves mental imagery of one kind or another.
Read MoreA post by Sofiia Rappe
Recent philosophy and cognitive sciences literature increasingly treats various phenomenal experiences as arising from constructive, “simulation” processes. This is the case for episodic remembering (Sutton, 2009; Sutton & O’Brien, 2022; Michaelian, 2016; Werning, 2020), perception (e.g., when viewed through the predictive processing lens, see Clark, 2016; Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2013), as well as counterfactual, future-oriented, and fantastical imagination, which are all characterized through construction of hypothetical or imagined scenarios (De Brigard & Parikh, 2019; Kind & Kung, 2016). This “trend,” in turn, has reignited a series of “continuity debates,” e.g., to what extent do perception and imagination, perception and episodic remembering, or imagination and dreaming (as some examples) share the exact constructive mechanisms and processes?[1] Are the differences between them differences in degree (e.g., of reliance on sensory input) or kind?
Read MoreA report by Amy Kind
Rewind to one year ago. In October 2023, a group of folks interested in imagination convened for a two-day workshop hosted by the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. We were brought together by Erik Viirre and Cassi Vieten with the aim of discussing their “Atlas of Imagination," a project that maps various dimensions of imagination and differentiates it from adjacent constructs. Workshop participants represented a variety of different disciplinary perspectives as well as a variety of occupations; in addition to philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, there were also academics who focus on imagination in teaching contexts like engineering, plus a number of practitioners who attend to imagination in their work on topics such as sonification, world-building, veteran affairs, or climate change. Over the course of that workshop, not only was considerable conceptual progress made but, perhaps just as importantly, some deep personal and scholarly connections were forged. And by the end of the two days, WIN – the World Imagination Network – was officially launched.
Read MoreA post by Mike Stuart
Practising scientists often find themselves in a position where existing resources are not enough. Maybe they have a good model, but they need measurements which can’t be gained via any of the usual methods. Or maybe the data is good, but none of the existing models can capture it well enough. In these situations, they must get creative.
While there is no guaranteed method for being creative, many rough guidelines exist. I’ve been working with scientists to identify and develop more such guidelines.[1] In this post, I want to consider what might seem like a surprising source of strategies for increasing creativity.
Read MoreA post by Christian O. Scholz
Aphantasia is a recently coined cognitive norm variant characterized by a severe deficiency or complete absence of voluntary mental imagery, most commonly the inability to visualize (Zeman et al., 2024). While aphantasia can be acquired, for example as the result of brain damage or a mental disorder (Keogh et al., 2021), most cases discussed in the contemporary literature focus on congenital (i.e., lifelong) aphantasia, meaning on people that have had deficient or absent imagery abilities from birth onwards or, at the very least, for as long as they can remember. For reasons that will become apparent shortly, I will focus only on congenital cases involving the complete inability to form visual mental imagery for the remainder of this post.
Read MoreA post by Adriana Clavel-Vázquez & Jimena Clavel Vázquez
Imagination is often invoked as central to our engagement with others. In particular, imaginatively inhabiting someone else’s point of view, or perspective-taking, is seen as crucial in understanding and motivating moral concern for agents in oppressive circumstances. Alluding to Ryle’s metaphor of the mind as a ghostly Robinson Crusoe, Amy Coplan sees perspective-taking as a promise of rescue from an isolated existence (Coplan 2011, 18), and, therefore, as a remedy for apathy. But what if the perspectives of others remain beyond the reach of imagination? Here we want to explore an alternative picture. Touting perspective-taking as the bridge to others obscures a fundamental flaw in this way of approaching the issue. We aren’t in fact living the isolated existence of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. Instead, we’re surrounded by others who are in a position to tell us about their experiences in the world. But does this mean that imagination plays no role? We believe that it can still be a helpful tool in listening. This is the alternative we want to explore.
Read More