A 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 MoreA post by Joseph G. Moore
I find myself in a Vermont snowstorm surrounded by a massive crowd of rowdy fans at a World Cup alpine ski race. The cheering is loud—very loud. So is the rock music, the excited public announcer, and the cowbells. Mikaela Shiffrin, the hometown favorite, is the very last competitor to come down the steep and icy slalom course. Mikaela skis beautifully—an amazing balance of daring, aggression and control. At the line, she beats the field by over a second, which is an eternity in alpine racing. Screeching stop, quick glimpse at her result on the big screen, and Mikaela throws her poles triumphantly in the air. The crowd is ecstatic and deafening. As am I: my eyes well up, a tingling “chills response” courses up the back of my neck, and I bellow inarticulately along with my new-found friends. As I watch teammates and coaches mob Mikaela, I’m overwhelmed with what can only be described as, well, euphoria.
Euphoria? Really? I’m mildly pleased, of course, that a local skier has brought notoriety to the hill. I suppose this matters a bit. The fact is, though, that I didn’t know Mikaela Shiffrin from Adam until I read about her in the race-day program. In fact, I don’t really understand, or care to understand alpine racing. I was there only to take in the local spectacle. Moreover, my “euphoria” lasts all of fifteen seconds, as my attention quickly shifts to beating the freezing crowd to the warm shuttle-bus that will take me back to my car. Not only is my euphoria strangely ephemeral, but I have no inclination to act on it by, say, trying to congratulate Mikaela or seek her autograph. I’d rather get to the bus.
Read MoreA post by Yunqing/Isaac Han
In this post, I discuss how we might use our social imaginings to advance social equality. Social imaginings are representations or reconstructions of an aspect of a society’s past, present, or future, e.g., class relations, inclusivity, event, an individual’s feelings and motivations (adapted from Medina 252). I focus here on social imaginings of the past that aim at past realities.[1] For example, when one imagines that there was actually no racial inequality in the past in the U.S. as part of a process of historical reconstruction one aims at reality (even if, in this case, one misses one’s aim), whereas when one entertains counterfactually the idea that there was no racial inequality in the past in the U.S. and then imagines how one might act in that alternate past, one is not aiming at reality. I focus on the former, reality-aiming imaginings (hereon just “social imaginings”) and discuss whether any such imaginings should be discouraged in social discourse.
Read MoreA post by Alex Fisher
Much recent work has explored how we learn through imagination, acquiring new attitudes in an epistemically justified manner. In other cases, however, imagination seems to infect our mental lives in a far less rational way.
Theatrical actors often describe how aspects of their character start to seep into their own personality as they get “stuck” in a role, experiencing “boundary blurring” or “character bleed”. Allen, a junior theatre major, admits:
You forget who you are sometimes. You start intermingling with this character and you lose yourself and you start doing things. […] I played a character who had a certain walk [and] I would walk around [that way] onstage. And I would be walking around [campus] and be doing the same thing. I would realize I'm doing that and having this bad attitude that this character has about everything I'm seeing. I think, “Whoa, I don't know if this has gone too far or not.” (Burgoyne, Poulin, and Rearden 1999, 162)
Isaac Butler reports experiencing similar as a budding actor in New York:
After performances, I would stare at a wall in my dorm room for hours trying to come back to normal. […] I hated the person I became during rehearsal as the nastiness of the character bled into my own personality, and I was not tough enough to manage the emotions my performance dug into. (Butler 2022, 15)
A similar phenomenon has been observed amongst virtual reality users. The “Proteus Effect” describes how individuals’ behaviour and attitudes conform to those of the avatar they play as (Yee and Bailenson 2007; 2009). Participants who controlled taller avatars in a virtual space behaved more confidently in a subsequent non-virtual negotiation task than those assigned shorter avatars, in line with the general behaviour of taller individuals. Participants who played an attractive avatar exhibited higher self-disclosure than those who played an unattractive avatar, just as attractive individuals tend to be more extroverted. Imaginatively adopting an identity in virtual reality influenced users’ actions even after it had been relinquished.
Read MoreA post by Nele Van de Mosselaer
Imagine the following situation: you open a door in a videogame. An in-game alert pops up with the message “Congratulations, you opened the door!” Immediately afterwards, the game – being apparently philosophically inclined – puts that message into question. A new pop-up alert clarifies that it is not really you, the player, who opened the door, but rather the player-character. Moreover, no door was opened. Rather, the action that took place was an input of a certain command on a controlling device. Someone moved the mouse around and clicked a button. Lastly, there was not even an actual door involved in this interaction, but merely a group of pixels, a computer-generated digital entity that is meant to evoke a door in your imagination. So, the game argues, you did not really open a door, did you? Would it not be more precise to say that you, taking on the role of the protagonist of this game, used your cursor to interact with a virtual model and thus fictionally opened a door that is represented to exist in the gameworld?
Read MoreA post by Nathanael Stein
This post is about a puzzle, a suspicion, and a cry for help. I need to make two points before I can raise the puzzle.
First, imagining a utopia is one of the most ambitious things you can do with the imagination, but it’s also a natural and maybe inevitable feature of our lives. (By ‘utopia’ I just mean a reasonably complete alternative form of social arrangement that is meant to be better than the present one in one or more aspects.) We spend a good amount of time imagining, or being caused to imagine, not just our own individual futures, but also a whole future way of life. These are hard to separate. Indeed, a lot of political discourse and manipulation depends on our tendency to have a vague but powerful imaginative picture of what the world might look like in 5, 10, 20 years. And such imaginings have had, to put it mildly, important real world consequences. Finally, if being able to imagine things’ being otherwise is a requirement of human freedom, to paraphrase Sartre, then imagining utopia is a non-negligible part of that activity. For a variety of reasons, then, utopian imagination deserves attention as a persistent feature of human life and world history.
Second, some utopian imaginings are better than others. In recent years philosophers have spent a fair amount of time examining the epistemic qualities of imagination for small scale matters, including under the heading of instructive vs. transcendent imagining. But there seem to be similar distinctions at the large scale as well: some utopian imaginings are more plausible than others, and some are more accurate than others about whether the alternative arrangements would indeed be better.
So this is the basis for my puzzle: utopian imagining is, I suggest, simply an extension of an exercise that we do all the time, and that Plato introduced into philosophy: imagining human social life under better or even ideal conditions. And this isn’t an exercise we need abandon on the grounds that there’s no difference between doing it well and doing it badly—even if it were possible to do so, which I doubt.
Read MoreA post by Sara Arjomand
Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” is a nonsense poem. Carroll begins:
“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe” (Carroll 1900).
Half of the words in the first stanza of “Jabberwocky” are made–up. None of us can say what “slithy toves” refers to, or what it means for these “slithy toves” to “gyre” and “gimble.” Despite Carroll’s use of gibberish, though, it seems that we’re able to imagine what’s happening. That’s strange. How are we able to imagine what we can’t understand? That’s the puzzle I’ll be interested in, here—the puzzle of the apparent imaginability of nonsense. Let’s try to solve it.
Read MoreA post by Megha Devraj
Content warning: mentions of sexual assault, descriptions of violence, mention of a gendered slur.
In 2004, in the Northeast Indian border state of Manipur, a group of middle-aged women collected to express their outrage at a gruesome incident of murder and sexual assault by members of an Indian paramilitary unit. They stripped all their clothing off their bodies and began to weep. A now famous photograph of the event shows them standing together in a row, completely nude, their bodies obscured by a large banner written in lettering designed to look like it was dripping blood: ‘Indian Army Rape Us’.
What made these women choose to speak against sexual violence by putting their own naked bodies on public display? Why not use a more comfortable means to voice dissent? It seems that there was something about their spectacular display of vulnerability that was able to jolt its audience into experiencing the oppressive force of the violence that Manipuri women are subject to. The scene of the protest was a profoundly moving one. Many of those present, including police personnel, cried upon looking at the women’s lament. Sentries who had initially pointed guns at the women withdrew their weapons, presumably because they too felt sorrowful or ashamed. Baring themselves allowed the women to convey their feelings of being violated in a way that descriptive speech likely could not. Their protest asked the Indian public to reimagine violence against women not as a regrettable consequence of national security, but as a cause of irreconcilable grief and anger.
My work focusses on a communicative device with special connections to imagination and creativity: spectacle. I think of a spectacle roughly as a communicative act that involves intentionally using the social significance of objects and spaces to a striking effect. Spectacles are present in protests and performance art, in parades and pageants, in public displays of national or military glory, and even in some cases of interpersonal communication. Here, I discuss spectacles that evoke painful emotions and how women use them as a response to sexual violence.
Read MoreThe Junkyard will take its usual summer break. We will return with regular posts in late August. Feel free to reach out with ideas for future posts. We wish you all a refreshing and productive summer. Happy Summering and Happy Imagining!
Read MoreA post by Michael T. Stuart
Yes, obviously. Some algorithms already do, or soon will. No, of course it can’t, don’t be silly, though it might be good to pretend it does. Who cares?
Let’s go through these different attitudes to the question one by one. In the end, I’ll suggest what I think is a better attitude.
Read MoreA post by Julia Langkau
We all seem to agree that intuitively, there is a strong link between fiction and imagination. Beginning with Walton's influential account of make-believe, imagining has been seen as the operative attitude when it comes to fiction as opposed to believing: "Imagining aims at the fictional as belief aims at the true." (Walton 1990: 41). This mutually exclusive distinction between imagining and believing has shaped much of the discussion about our engagement with fiction, such as the definition of the relevant kind of imagination, patchwork puzzles, etc. The claim, as I understand it, has been a normative one (see Balcerak Jackson & Langkau 2022) — after all, Walton talks in terms of what fiction prescribes. Even if it turned out that most people actually believed most fictions while reading – perhaps before realizing they were fictions and then disbelieving them – they would all be making a mistake: they should have imagined instead.
Read More