A post by Tom Schoonen
It's been almost ten years since a great burst of logics of imagination appeared (depending on when you start counting, of course). The idea behind these formalisations is that, although “imagination will take you anywhere,” it will not take you anywhere. That is, there is some method to the madness and the aim is to capture this in a logical framework. (Note that most logics of imagination focus mainly on reality-oriented imagination, I will follow suit here.) Theorists working on the logic of imagination try to strike a balance: we can imagine things we believe, or know, to be false (“imagination will take you anywhere”), though in most instances of imagination it does not seem to be the case that anything goes (“well…, not anywhere”). In this post, I want to highlight a worry for a branch of the most popular logics of imagination, based on joint work with Aybüke Özgün and Tianyi Chu.
Read MoreA post by Cassandra Vieten
As a psychologist and researcher, my career has focused on how people change. In particular, I have investigated the experiences, practices, and environments that transform people’s worldviews—their stories about themselves and the world—and as a result, change their thinking patterns, behavior, biology and brain. Over a couple of decades of research, I am convinced that extraordinary experiences can change us in profound and lasting ways. Just like an experience of trauma can change us in lasting ways, a profoundly positive experience can change us in positive ways: kind of like post-traumatic stress in reverse.
But here’s the surprising part: those experiences don’t always have to be real. More accurately, those experiences don’t have to be externally or physically real: they can happen in our imagination. Practicing imagination holds the potential to transform our lives into something extraordinary. Even negative imagination, when we don’t get stuck there, can be helpful in our personal growth journey.
Read MoreA post by Nick Wiltsher
Here are three related claims to which I’m increasingly sympathetic:
(1) Imagination has no distinctive epistemic ends.
(2) The epistemic ends that can be pursued using imagination are better achieved by other means.
(3) There is, all the same, value in using imagination to pursue (some) epistemic ends.
Claim (3) only matters if claims (1) and (2) stand up. So let’s see if they do.
Read MoreA post by Caterina Moruzzi
Imagine the near future of 2030 where AI has become deeply embedded in creative workflows. What does that future look like?
This is one of the questions that we are asking the participants in the “Future Proofing Creative Skills for Responsible AI Adoption” workshop series (https://crea-tec.weebly.com/workshops.html). Through these workshops we aim to identify and discuss the new and future-proof skills that creators need in the current technological landscape.
This post is about the significance of imagining the future of our creative interactions with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in order to proactively anticipate the transformative impact of these emerging technologies on creative education and professional practice. I will talk about how the workshop series was designed to account for this significance, and present some preliminary insights from the initial sessions.
Read MoreA post by Heidi L. Maibom and Kyle Furlane
In his essay Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell describes the following encounter with a fascist: “a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.” (Orwell 2021)
In this passage, Orwell describes a Gestalt switch taking place as a result of a seemingly insignificant detail, namely an enemy soldier being half-dressed and holding up his pants. This brings his humanity into view. We want to suggest that this “view” is not entirely metaphorical. Orwell experiences the person as a fellow human being instead of as a fascist.
Read MoreA post by Shannon Spaulding
Can you have trust without understanding? This is not an esoteric question. It is a question directly relevant for the many politically and affectively polarized debates in our society. Individuals on either side of these polarized debates find it difficult to empathically imagine the perspective of someone on the other side, and to see what is subjectively reasonable about the other’s perspective. Moreover, individuals on either side of these polarized debates tend to distrust those on the other side. Such polarization raises the question whether there is a rational way out of this dynamic.
Read MoreA post by Radu Bumbăcea
The perfect mind-reader. When you go to the office in the morning, your colleague is already there: after saying hello, she scans you for a few seconds, tracks your eye and then says ‘oh, so you are still musing about the cactus that we got rid of three weeks ago.’ This colleague of yours is a perfect mind-reader: she picks up on all the possible cues, puts them together almost instantaneously, and is able to realise what you feel, no matter how discrete you are trying to be.
The prospect of such a colleague might make one eager to work from home. But why? What could have gone wrong with the practice of understanding others, usually much praised?
Read MoreA post by Catherine Wearing
Recent gains in the capabilities of generative AI systems pose a dilemma for our thinking about creativity. On the one hand, some of the products of these systems seem pretty creative. Some of the images generated by Midjourney and stories generated by ChatGPT are good enough that, had they been produced by humans, they would count as creative. Similarly, systems like AlphaFold (which predicts the 3D structures of proteins) and AlphaGo (which plays the boardgame Go to a level of proficiency sufficient to beat human grandmasters) produce results which have some claim to count as creative. On the other hand, most people are reluctant to grant that these AI systems themselves are creative.
One tempting reaction to this clash of intuitions is to divorce the criteria for a creative product from those for a creative producer. If there’s a way to acknowledge the creativity of a product while denying creativity to its producer, then we can respect both of the intuitions which generative AI systems provoke. This is the strategy I want to explore here.
Read MoreA post by Steve Humbert-Droz
In this blog, the game consists of making as many connections between any topics and imagination as possible. Sometimes, like today, these connections seem almost scandalous: what could be further from imagination than intelligence? They even appear antithetical: meticulous scientists can lack mental images (Galton, 1880); conversely, Art Brut artists create highly imaginative works despite cognitive impairments. This prejudice dates back at least to Hume (1738: 118), who defines (one sense of) imagination as the opposite of reason.
Of course, some precise senses of imagination are more compatible with intelligence — think of Kant’s synthesizing faculty. But in a broader sense, imagination and intelligence share striking similarities: both apply across various tasks (domain-general), come in degrees, are unequally distributed across the population, and are partially normative (it is better to have a lot of them).
Perhaps due to these similarities, some types of imagination seem to play a central role in intelligence. Moreover, debates over their definition and scope mirror each other. This post explores these two connections between imagination and intelligence, with the aim that philosophical investigation into both fields may benefit from each other.
Read MoreA post by Katia Franco
Trust is a fragile thing, especially when it comes to trust in ourselves. Knowing as much as we do about ourselves, having to evaluate the constantly incoming evidence about our own trustworthiness, self-trust is a difficult task to manage. More to the point, trust in ourselves is particularly fragile because it hinges on a delicate issue at the intersection of ethics and psychology: self-deception.
Unlike with interpersonal deception, when one person intentionally misleads another, there is no agreement as to whether self-deception is an intentional act. In fact, the currently dominant view is that self-deception is an understandable and unintentional psychological response to a difficult situation (Bach 1997, Barnes 1997, Johnston 1988, Mele 2001). Under intense psychological pressure, such as anxiety or a strong desire for something to be the case, it makes sense that we might (unintentionally) come to believe something that does not align with the evidence – a sort of self-preservation response. For example, one might be often irritated by someone, and under the psychological pressure to view themselves as a good person, they might misidentify the source of their irritation to be that other person’s bad behavior, rather than the fact that such behavior reminds them of their own bad behavior.
Read MoreA post by Zuzanna Rucińska
Gaslighting is a form of emotional manipulation in which “the gaslighter tries (consciously or not) to induce in someone a sense that her reactions, perceptions, memories and/or beliefs are not just mistaken, but utterly without grounds – paradigmatically, so unfounded as to qualify as crazy” (Abramson, 2014, p. 2). Can you do that to yourself? I propose you can, and that imagination is involved in the process too.
Read MoreA post by Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s (1648-1695) Primero Sueño (First Dream) is an astonishing epistemological poem that follows the flight of an intellectual soul, freed from its body by the sleep of reason, as it seeks to understand all of creation. Of the many subjects worthy of philosophical interest in the epic poem, my focus will be the way its incredible imagery hints at a psychological ontology. Quotations of Sor Juana’s [SJ] Spanish-language verse in the following are my own English glosses.
Read MoreThis 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 following Tuesday through today.
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Commentary from Margot Strohminger
How Much of an Alternative to Simulationism?
On a popular philosophical conception, the imagination serves to ‘simulate’ or ‘recreate’ many ordinary mental states and processes. The scope of ordinary mental states and processes that can be simulated is thought to include at least the experiences at work in visual and other sensory perception. It is thus natural to ask how much of an alternative to simulation Hopkins’ account of the sensory imagination represents—a question Hopkins himself briefly addresses in the final chapter of The Profile of Imagining (PI). There Hopkins emphasizes the differences between his profiling account of sensory imagination and a simulationist approach.
In this commentary I will explore the possibility that the profiling account is compatible with, and even a welcome supplementation to, simulationism. We can understand simulationism as providing a schematic theory of the imagination and the profiling account as filling in gaps left open by simulationism for the special case of sensory imagining. Thus the two approaches are not in genuine competition.
Read MoreThis 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 More