A post by Stephen Asma
Imagination is finally getting some love from philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists.
My own work has been a tiny contribution to the resurgence of imagination studies, especially in the interface between neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and evolution (Asma, 2017). This essay, however, is not about respectable imagination studies. No, this is about the weird stuff –the eccentric history and philosophy of imagination.
None of what follows will get you tenure, or an invitation to speak somewhere prestigious. It will not gain you influential friends, and it might even prevent you from getting a date. But it needs to be aired, contemplated, and even celebrated. As cognitively fluid systems (like imagination, or language) expand into ecological niches, they themselves “play” and “experiment” and sometimes become adaptations, or exaptations, or spandrels, or deleterious dead ends. Theories are like this too. To my mind, not all the weird theories of imagination presented below are dead ends, and some may yet prove valuable –even if we’re not sure how.
Read MoreA post by Corey S. Pressman
How might we arrive at a distinctive definition of the human animal? Taxonomy leaves little on the table. Clearly, it is not our spines, hands, bipedalism, or brainstems that define us. In the end, what puts the sapiens in Homo sapiens is essentially cortical. Our species benefits from a variety of neurological novelties such as phonemic speech, self awareness, and neuroplasticity.
And also this about the human brain: imagination lives here. Like so many other taxonomic gifts, imagination itself is ancient. But while other species may have rudimentary forms of imagination, human imagination gets up to all kinds of species-specific shenanigans. Culture, science, art, stories, selves: all of these belong to the human imagination, as does anxiety, society, and the cultural habits that contribute to climatic and economic dissonance.
However, the soaring possibilities offered by human imagination are balanced by another amazing neurological feature: automaticity. Automaticity refers to the process by which certain tasks or behaviors become so well-learned and practiced that they can be performed without conscious effort or attention. In the context of the brain and behavior, automaticity refers to the ability to carry out tasks efficiently and effectively with minimal conscious awareness or cognitive resources. When a behavior becomes automatic, it is executed quickly and effortlessly, often without the need for deliberate decision-making or conscious monitoring. This phenomenon is facilitated by the brain's ability to form neural pathways and consolidate learning through repetition and practice.
Read MoreA post by Peter Kung and Shawn Klein
Peter is a lifelong Eagles fan. Shawn is a diehard Patriots fan. We separately watched Super Bowl LII and, to put it mildly, felt wild swings of emotion. But…why? It was only a game. Why do sports fans sometimes (often?) go crazy at sporting events and then afterwards go about their day as if nothing much happened. If something of genuine significance happened, something that warranted the emotional ups and downs the fan experienced during the game, why don’t its effects linger?
Walton (2015) thinks this puzzle of sports fandom parallels the paradox of fiction.
“The fan imagines that the outcome matters immensely and imagines caring immensely—while (in many cases) realizing that it doesn’t actually matter much, if at all. She is caught up in the world of the game, as the spectator at the theater is caught up in the story. Afterwards, like the playgoer, she steps outside of the make-believe and goes back to living her life as though nothing much had happened—even if the home team suffered a devastating and humiliating defeat. It’s just a story; it’s just a game” (p. 77).
Walton himself and other authors (Wildman 2019, Moore 2019) who have tried to explain this aspect of sports fandom have applied Walton’s theory in a quite limited way. These three Waltonians have an impoverished view of sports make-believe and sports fandom. There’s a better way to apply the Waltonian theory to sports.
Read MoreA post by Anatolii Kozlov
“There is something hinky in the local junkyard.” – What is it? What? A strange phrase evokes a sense of intrigue and anticipation. As if indeed there’s a fuzzy pile of rusty junk at a distance, and something – or someone – is about to spring out from the side of it. Will it? I scroll further through the list of writing prompts:
“Someone has a much-needed conversation with an A.I.”
“A garden statue comes to life.”
“An artist cannot finish their masterpiece.”
“A pet whose owner treats them like a human child.”
These are startling, amusing, evocative prompts, very different from the ones found in a philosopher’s paper on imagination. “Imagine there is a horse”. “Imagine a flying horse”. “Imagine a purple horse”. Suppose I did. So what? What did I learn in this less-than-miniscule moment of imagining? At the same time, what hides behind the other strings of words that makes them so appealing to engage with and start imagining? This is not to say that the classification of imagination through ordinary language is somehow philosophically idle. Still, something valuable seems to be lost if a philosopher’s exercise in imagination ends right there.
Read MoreA post by Christopher Bartel
When children play with toys, imagination is put to a distinctive and familiar use, which we might call projective imagining. This is a use of imagination that adults don’t have many opportunities to employ. However, a recent trend in video gaming offers one. Here is an example.
Stardew Valley is a video game released in 2016. Gamers describe it as a farming simulator. In the game, the player inherits an old farm from their grandfather. The farm has fallen into poor shape. The player’s job is to make the farm profitable again, which would make the ghost of their grandfather very proud. The player can also explore the nearby village, interact with the villagers, and develop relationships with the villagers by giving them gifts and doing favors for them. While the primary activity of the game is caring for the farm—tilling the soil, planting crops, harvesting them—a significant portion of the player’s time can be taken up by developing relationships with the villagers. Players can date some characters, marry them, and have children. The game is as much a soap opera as it is a farming simulator.
Read MoreA post by Felipe Morales Carbonell
I want to consider the following idea: sometimes it happens that after becoming acquainted with a topic, one becomes less able to imagine certain things about it. What could this really mean? How could this happen, and why? Here some thoughts:
One possibility is that what one once imagined as possible (and thus judged as imaginable) was then judged to be impossible. A novice in woodworking might have a mistaken idea of what procedures can be done to achieve certain results, just because they do not know any better, and imagine themselves achieving those results by performing these mistaken procedures. Having learned that those procedures are faulty, they will not attempt to imagine themselves trying to achieve those results by imagining themselves following those procedures (this is all separate from the question of whether they can learn the right procedures).
Would we say that in this case the subject has lost the ability to imagine x? I think it is probably more natural to say that they were mistaken about their abilities. They could imagine something that wasn’t what they thought they could imagine, so they were able to imagine something. But they were unable to imagine what they thought they had imagined, and they came to discover their inability.
Read MoreA post by Stephen Müller
The realm of sensory imagination is a place where dragons soar and unicorns prance, highlighting a pivotal feature of mental imagery: it can represent things that do not exist. This fact is broadly recognized yet seldom examined in the face of the substantial challenges it presents to standard theories of representation, such as informational and teleosemantic frameworks. These frameworks hinge on the notion that a sequence of physical events—like light reflecting off an apple and being processed by our visual system—culminates in the mental representation of the apple (e.g., Pylyshyn, 2007; Recanati, 2012; Neander, 2017)[1]. Hence, these theories do not easily extend to the representation of non-existent entities, where no light from fictitious creatures reaches our eyes.
Adopting a positivist perspective, one might question what it even means for mental images to represent non-existent entities. It verges on the Meinongian to propose that "there are objects of mental imagery about which it is true that there are no such objects" (compare Meinong, 1904 / 1960). Thus, it falls upon philosophers to navigate these tricky waters carefully, ensuring that our explanations do not introduce bizarre ontologies or outright contradictions. This brings us to the core question I wish to delve into: What kinds of objects do our mental images represent, and by what process do they come to represent them?
Read MoreA post by Andrea Rivadulla Duró
We spend a fair amount of time imagining experiences and do so nonchalantly. Take Mary, for example, who works as a security guard in a government building where the hours stretch long and monotonous. As she stands immovable as a pin, she watches the day's traffic ebb and flow for eight hours a day. Her aspirations for a brighter future are dim, compelling her to retreat into imagination during working hours. In her daydream, she imagines herself as a pianist, hearing the resounding applause of an audience, feeling the weight of a trophy in her hands, and basking in the glow of faces of recognition.
It is well established that Mary’s imagining can evoke emotions akin to those experienced during actual events (Holmes & Matheus, 2010). As Mary imagines, she might momentarily feel joy. Nevertheless, setting aside these immediate emotional responses, imagining is typically considered harmless from a long-term perspective. Mary is aware that her imagined episode does not track changes in the world (i.e. it lacks world-sensitivity; Badura & Kind, 2021). Consequently, Mary will not attribute evidential value to the imagined, nor will she adjust her attitudes based on it.
In the philosophical literature, perception is characterized as having assertoric force: It inclines the perceiver to believe its content (Chasid & Weksler, 2020). In contrast, perceptual imagination is commonly taken to be non-assertoric: Imagining winning a piano contest does not incline the imaginer to believe they actually won.
Read MoreA post by Hannah Kim
I saw Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things over winter break, and I was impressed. The costumes, settings, and even castings (Mark Ruffalo!) felt original, and I had a hard time describing the work to others (“it’s a… Frankenstein-meets-Barbie-meets-Siddhartha in a twisted-Wes-Anderson-meets-Salvador-Dali style”).
The ability to conjure up people, places, and events in a compelling manner is a real imaginative feat, and it’s common to think that fiction is more imaginative than nonfiction. This holds for both senses of the word ‘imaginative’: producing a work of fiction seems to require more creativity (the ability to come up with something novel and meritorious), at least when it comes to content generation. Creating fiction also seems to involve more use of imagination—there’s a sense in which we don’t want non-fiction creation to involve imagination!
In fact, what’s been dubbed the “consensus view” of fiction closely connects fiction to imagination and defines fiction as works where the creator intends for the audience to imagine, and not believe, its contents. Stacie Friend (2012) and Derek Matravers (2014) question this close connection between fiction and imagination, arguing that any representational works, including nonfiction, invite the consumers to imagine their content.
Read MoreA post by Avshalom Schwartz
The current crisis of liberal democracy has brought with it growing concerns over the inability of citizens to agree on basic facts, beliefs, and views about the world. This issue, which is sometimes described as “deep disagreement” or “belief polarization” (cf. Suhay, Tenenbaum, and Bartola 2022; de Ridder 2021), poses a profound challenge to democratic politics. When citizens no longer share in these basic things—when they perceive the world in radically different ways—democratic politics become hard, if not impossible. As Muirhead and Rosenblum have recently put it, “without a shared understanding of what it means to know something and to hold a common account of the essential contours of political reality, collective political action is impossible. Common sense is the required touchstone of democratic public life, and it is under attack” (2019, 123).
Although these concerns have become increasingly salient in contemporary political discourse, they are far from new. Philosophers have been grappling with them since at least classical antiquity, often turning to the mental faculty of imagination in attempting to explain the psychological and epistemological underpinnings of this problem. For Plato—who offered one of the earliest theoretical accounts of this mental faculty—the divergence between how different individuals may perceive and experience the physical world has to do, in part, with how phantoms and images (phantasmata and eikones) operate on the imagination (phantasia or eikasia) (cf. Resp., 510d–11). Similarly, Aristotle held that the variance between different individuals’ perceptions and misperceptions of the world might be due to their imagination. Unlike ‘proper sensation’ or reason, our imagination (phantasia) could be right or wrong, a fact reflected in the role it plays in dreams, hallucinations, and errors more generally (DA, 428a6-20).
Read MoreA post by Isabelle Wentworth
The capacity for creativity has long been used to index humanity—it’s part of what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. This logic—like all forms of categorisation—has both inclusionary and exclusionary force. We’ve seen it finance archaeological explorations for Hominid art, and also become instrument of oppression and empire—recall Thomas Jefferson’s justification for the expulsion of emancipated slaves from the United States, as “among the blacks there is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.” (1781)
AI creativity is looking to challenge this logic. We’ve had some fears about what artificial creativity means for us in the past—bolstered by AI story-grammar storytelling models in the early 2000s—but they have taken on new urgency since the creation of AI which can not only analyse data but learn its underlying patterns to generate original material.
Of course, it’s important to know whether AI is genuinely creative, or whether its output just mimics creativity. That answer will depend on what theory of creativity we decide to use, but before we can make that decision it’s important to ensure we’ve addressed all the factors of ‘creativity’ in the first place. Here we might look to Mel Rhodes’ conceptual model of the dimensions of creativity. In this model, we have product (that is, the actual creative output, such as the text or artwork); the person (the creator of the art); and the process (Rhodes, 1961).
Read MoreA post by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich
The world is on fire, we have been told again and again. The seas are rising, the storm clouds are gathering. But who can fix a planet? We look outside and for most of us, most of the time, the weather is fine—maybe a little hotter, a little drier than the year before, but there is no catastrophe visible out the window. Because the climate crisis happens at planetary scale, on a timeline of seasons and years and eons, it is hard to see.
At the same time, many people are exhausted by the climate debates, which have been stretching on now for decades. Scientists are exhausted in their unceasing efforts to sound the alarm and provide further data on the likely consequences of human carbon emissions. Activists are exhausted by the trench warfare of policy reform and incremental political progress, where every yard of gain is seemingly offset by a reactionary rollback somewhere else. Climate anxiety can feel ubiquitous, but after years of blaring alarm bells, the dire warnings threaten to become background noise—a dispiriting drone for anyone paying attention, but too quotidian to catalyze change.
Read MoreA post by Milena Ivanova
When Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl performed their famous experiment, the results of which were published in 1958, their experiment was widely celebrated for its beauty, clarity and significance. The experiment came only 5 years after the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. This experiment aimed to offer a decisive answer to the question James Watson and Francis Crick posited in their paper ‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids’, published in Nature in 1953: how does DNA replicate? Three hypotheses about DNA replication were offered at the time: conservative, semi-conservative, and dispersive. Meselson and Stahl offered what many consider to be a crucial experiment that decisively answers this question in favour of the semi conservative replicon. The experiment is celebrated for producing important, clear and decisive results and to have definitively settled the question on DNA replication. Beyond producing these results, the very design of this experiment is considered elegant, original and beautiful, making it, according to many, the most beautiful experiment in biology. In ‘What makes a beautiful experiment?’ I have argued that what makes this experiment particularly aesthetically valuable is the relationship between its design and its results, and the original ways in which Meselson and Stahl decided to label DNA in the experiment, using density-gradient centrifugation to study the weight of the different strands of DNA they obtained during the experiment, rather than the standard techniques used at the time. This element of their experiment was original and creative.
Read MoreA post by Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng
Hess (2021) contends that critical reconstructionism and abolitionism prompt us to critically assess and change the conditions influencing our lives, whether through reform, transformation, or abolition. This transformative endeavour involves envisioning alternatives that diverge significantly from the current path shaped by converging crises. Music can deeply contribute to this imaginative process by encouraging us to perceive things differently, overcome limitations in understanding others, and engage in “freedom dreaming” (p. 273), a belief that dreaming is imperative for societal transformation, recognising that having a vision for the future not only informs present actions but also shapes society’s trajectory. Using this reconstructive standpoint prompts us to acknowledge that the evocative influence of music videos surpasses mere entertainment.
Read MoreA post by Margot Strohminger
Supposition often comes up in discussions of propositional imagination as a way of getting clearer on what the latter is (not): supposing that p is typically assumed to be different from imagining that p. We can thus expect thinking about the nature of supposition to help theorists of imagination—including readers of this blog—to understand their primary concern. (All this is not to deny that supposition is interesting in its own right. I think it is.)
In this post I will consider one account of what we are doing when we suppose that p. It is part of a recent reductionist theory of imagination defended by Peter Langland-Hassan in his 2020 book, Explaining Imagination. (This blog hosted a discussion of the book when it first appeared—for Peter’s overview, see here).
Read MoreThe Junkyard will be on hiatus for the winter break. We will return in mid-January with new weekly postings. Our best wishes for a restorative winter break, and we look forward to lots of great posts on imagination in 2024!
Read MoreA post by Neil Van Leeuwen
Is imagination epistemically safe?
In some intuitive sense of that phrase, the answer is yes. One can imagine outlandish and false things without risk of being wrong. I can imagine that I am a walrus without the epistemic failure that would obtain if I believed that I am a walrus. Sure, the content is false, but that’s okay: I’m only imagining it. The difference in attitude, even holding content fixed, makes a difference to epistemic risk.
The view just expressed is natural enough that one might even appeal to “epistemic safety” for the very purpose of characterizing what it is to have an imaginative attitude. Here’s Peter Langland-Hassan’s initial characterization of attitude imagining: “Attitude imaginings (or A-imaginings) are, again, cases of rich, elaborated, epistemically safe thought about the possible, pretended, unreal, and so on.”[1] Langland-Hassan’s subsequent theoretical task is to articulate the psychological structure of the mental states that fit that broad specification; if he does this well, he’s given a theory of attitude imagining.
Read MoreA post by Max Jones
I imagine that, if you’re reading this, you probably think the imagination is a good thing. If, like me, you find the imagination fascinating, you may have become fond of it over years of wondering about it, and may have been awed by the things that it can do.
I’ve recently been thinking a lot on Ryle’s “Thought and Imagination” (1979, 51-64) (which may account for the somewhat arcane style that I’ve decided to write this in, channelling an imagined hybrid of myself and Ryle!). Thinking about Ryle’s posthumously published work on imagination has made me begin to worry about the apparent goodness of imagination. I worry that we may have been missing something in failing to see that the imagination is often considered to be a good thing in and of itself.
Why is it good to use your imagination? There are obviously lots of benefits that can come from using one’s imagination, but we often talk as though there is something intrinsically good about using one’s imagination and perhaps even about imagination itself.
Read MoreA post by Ruxandra Teodorescu
As a genre, Science Fiction often engages with philosophical themes and questions, its genre conventions providing a unique platform for exploring philosophical ideas in imaginative and speculative contexts. Its emphasis on detailed worldbuilding creates an immersive experience, accessible through one’s imagination, from which one can emerge knowledgeable about subjective perspectives other than one’s own. While this epistemic access to different experiential perspectives is not devoid of challenges in practice, it shows how literature can engage the reader in moral dilemmas. Oftentimes, authors deliberately challenge or subvert traditional moral frameworks to provoke reflection and incite empathy.
Contemporary philosophers and literary scholars (most notably Nussbaum 1990) have theorized that reading fiction can encourage readers to shift perspectives and engage in moral exploration and hypothetical moral decision-making while contemplating their positions on and in these fictional narratives. Over the years these assumptions have been subject to empirical studies, which James O. Young (2018) summarizes for The Junkyard and assesses that engaging with fiction improves affective and cognitive empathy.
In the following, by delving into Amy Kind’s work on epistemic accessibility and studies of the moral imagination by both Mark Johnson and Mark Coeckelbergh, I argue that literary narratives allow us to probe moral norms and look beyond our subjective experience. Applied to SF, this demonstrates how the genre’s specific distance from and yet connection to contemporary times provides a productive playground for moral thought experiments. Finally, showing that the nature of ethical concepts and principles is not detached from their relationship to the world, I will investigate the example of C. Robert Cargill’s Day Zero to show how AI narratives do their part in challenging and furthering the ontological foundations of ethics.
Read MoreA post by Thomas Naselaris
For most people, it feels right to talk about mental imagery as a kind of visual experience. However, few experience mental imagery as being exactly like seeing, and describing the ways in which mental imagery differs from seeing is challenging. It is a bit like trying to explain the style of a visual artist whose works have been displayed to you alone. If it were easy to convey a visual style with words, there would probably be nothing special about it.
One of the goals of empirical research on mental imagery should be to develop and name concepts that explain, rigorously and measurably, what makes mental images so different from seen ones, while making clear the connection between seeing and imagining.
An important first stab at this is the characterization of mental imagery as “weak vision” (Pearson et al) . This characterization is certainly consistent with my subjective experience of imagery, which is weaker than my experience of seeing, and it is consistent with objective measurements of brain activity, which is indeed much weaker during imagery than vision (Breedlove et al).
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