This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Kathleen Stock's recent book: Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017). See here for Kathleen's introduction. Additional commentaries and replies will run each day this week.
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Commentary from Niels Klenner: Moderating Extreme Intentionalism
Kathleen Stock’s extreme intentionalism takes the authorial intention to be both necessary and sufficient for a proposition to be true in fiction. This is what makes her view extreme. Should we follow Stock in being extreme?
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we host a symposium on Kathleen Stock's recent book: Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017). Today we begin with an introduction from Kathleen, followed by the first commentary and reply. Additional commentaries and replies will run each day this week.
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In my book Only Imagine, I start with a fairly basic question, the answering of which, I argue, has many implications: for the nature of fiction, imagination, and more besides. This is: how can we best characterise the practice of interpreting what happens in the plot of a novel or story (or what is “fictionally true” in that work, as it’s sometimes called)?
Read MoreA post by Luke Roelofs.
In ‘The Heterogeneity of the Imagination’, Amy Kind argues that no single mental faculty can do all the work imagination has been assigned by philosophers. I can’t address every point Kind makes, but I’ll sketch a case for the homogeneity of the ‘imagination’ appealed to in the four contexts she focuses on.
Read MoreA post by Bence Nanay.
What do philosophers do when they think about imagination? You may think they close their eyes, visualize an apple and then try to think hard about what they experience when they do so. Well, some (many?) philosophers of imagination do in fact do this at least to establish some of their premises. The aim of this piece is to argue that they really should not!
Read MoreA post by Eric Peterson.
Following Liao (2016), we can say that imaginative resistance is roughly a phenomenon where otherwise competent imaginers fail to comply with a request to imagine some proposition. In the literature on imaginative resistance, philosophers tend to focus on particular propositions that are purported to be a cause of resistance. These can be referred to as “puzzling propositions”. Examples of these puzzling propositions are the often cited “Giselda” (Walton 1994) or the last sentence of Weatherson’s (2004) “Death on a Freeway.” In this short blog post, I want to explore a different kind of puzzling propositions—implied puzzling propositions.
Read MoreA post by Kengo Miyazono.
Philosophical discussion of truth-in-fiction begins with the observation that what is true-in-fiction cannot simply be identified with what is explicitly stated in the fictional text. For example, being explicitly stated is not necessary for being true-in-fiction. It is not explicitly stated in the texts of Sherlock Holmes stories that Holmes livers nearer to Paddington Station than Waterloo Station, but it is true-in-Holmes. (What is explicitly stated is that Holmes lives in Baker Street.) In this post, however, I discuss another issue which is less frequently discussed; being explicitly stated in the text is not sufficient for being true-in-fiction.
Read MoreA post by Mike Stuart.
When I get mad at my smartphone because it freezes, or when I plead with my car because it won’t start, I’m treating a non-human object as if it had beliefs and goals. This is mostly harmless, but in science it can obscure the truth. For Aristotle, rocks fell down because they were trying to get to the centre of the universe, and flames reached up to rise above the air. It took more than a millennium to overturn this natural way of thinking. Similar sentiments can still be found in scientific practice towards everything from molecules to economies.
Read MoreA Post by Samantha Matherne
How capacious a role does the imagination play in our lives? Here’s one more restrictive answer: the imagination is exercised in a relatively narrow set of experiences, like visualization, make-believe, and some aesthetic experiences, like reading a novel or going to the theater. It seems that what these experiences have in common is that they involve a sensory experience of something that is, in some sense, not real. I say ‘in some sense’ because sometimes the object imagined is not real in the sense that it cannot possibly be real, e.g., when my niece pretends she is riding a unicorn. At other times, however, the object that we imagine is not per se impossible. For example, when I imagine brunch with Stevie Nicks, although I am sadly not at brunch with her right now, were I so lucky, I could be.
Read MorePhilosophers have a love-hate relationship with the imagination. René Descartes, for one, disparaged it as ‘more of a hindrance than a help’ in answering the most profound questions about the nature of existence. Trying to imagine one’s way towards metaphysical truth, he wrote in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), is as foolish as falling asleep in the hope of obtaining a clearer picture of the world through dreams.
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Read MoreA post by Nick Wiltsher.
Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to deprecate faculty psychology, by which I mean the tidy division of mental states into a small number of faculties, each typified by a certain power, and the description and explanation of aspects of the mental in terms of the expression and interaction of those powers. (Many such philosophers find the tidy division of mental states into a large number of modules, each typified by a certain function, and the explanation of aspects of the mental in terms of the interaction of those functions, much more edifying.) In some domains, faculty talk nonetheless enjoys some kind of afterlife. Most obviously, perception is often discussed as if some states share a certain essential capacity, and thus form a small and exclusive club. In other domains, however, the faculty is dead. When it comes to imagination, few philosophers seem keen, even implicitly, to suppose that the motley selection of acts commonly called “imaginative” are united as a kind by some common power. One might wonder what’s lost by abandoning this way of thinking, but here I just want to ask the ostensibly simpler question of who killed the imaginative faculty.
Read MoreA post by Thalia Goldstein.
Theatre is obviously artifice. An audience pays money, sets a date and a time they will go to the theater, walks in, sits down all facing the same way, and waits for the lights to go out.
Meanwhile, actors, directors, and designers rehearse, prepare, raise money, and rehearse some more, and then arrive backstage 30 minutes before the audience walks in to put on costumes and make up, and warm up their bodies, voices, and minds to portray fictional characters in a fictional world.
Yet at the same time, theatre is particularly real. All art relies on a language of representation. Visual art uses paint, sculpture, decoupage, etc, to express an idea. Music uses sound; Literature, the written word. Dance uses the body and face, but in a way we hardly ever see in daily life. Theatre is unique. Theatre uses real humans, saying real words, and interacting with each other in realistic ways. Even if the play is not realistic, even in the most experimental of theater, humans are still there, behaving. How do we understand this realness? How do we balance automatic reactions (e.g. person processing) with an imagined, presented scenario?
Read MoreA Post by Peter Langland-Hassan
Here is a popular view: when we take in a fiction, we do so by imagining the propositions it contains (perhaps in addition to others it suggests or implies). These imaginings—and not any beliefs—are then partly responsible for the emotions we experience in response to the fiction. In this post I want to explore some tensions in this view as it appears in the work of some influential philosophers (e.g. Nichols (2004a, 2006); Weinberg & Meskin (2006); Schroeder & Matheson (2006), Carruthers (2006), Kind (2011), Spaulding (2015), Van Leeuwen (2016)).
Read MoreA post by Fiora Salis.
Scientific models crucially involve imagination. But what sort of imagination is this? Answering this question is crucial to an understanding of the ways in which scientists construct and develop models in order to learn about reality. Philosophers of science do not offer explicit analyses of imagination but they commonly associate it with mental imagery. Some authors see the imagistic character of imagination as an asset in explaining how scientific models work, but most scientists and philosophers dismiss the imagination as soon as it is linked to mental imagery. I share this scepticism and I offer reasons for it toward the end of this post. But one cannot see the imagination as being crucial to scientific models and also dismiss it because of its allegedly imagistic character. The solution I have offered to this apparent puzzle consists in arguing that the sort of imagination that is really crucial to scientific models is propositional imagination of the make-believe variety (Salis 2016, Salis and Frigg forthcoming). Here I will briefly state the main argument in support of this idea.
Read MoreA post by Anna Ichino.
When I was at High School, I always used the same pen for written tests as I took notes with in my classes: after all, it already knew the right answers. When I cycle to work, I always make sure to get over the same ‘lucky crack’ in the road. At the supermarket, I always pick the second item in the row on a shelf. And I read my horoscope every Thursday. I feel slightly ashamed in reporting all these small rituals and superstitious practices that punctuate my everyday life; but I know I’m in good company. Students, athletes, politicians, musicians are all categories of people well-known for the propitiatory rituals and lucky charms they engage with. You may know for instance of David Beckham’s famous pre-game rituals, like stepping in the pitch with the right foot first (to ensure right shots), or wearing a brand-new football outfit at each match. And apparently Beckham’s fans are ready to pay quite some money to possess his ‘old’ outfits – as indeed people do for such things as Lady Diana’s wedding dress, or John Lennon’s hand-written lyrics. As these particular objects seem to mean a lot to us, by the way, so we tend to charge with special meanings some events in the lives of their owners: think of the sort of conspiracy theories circulating about Diana’s car-crash (which, obviously, ‘couldn’t be just an accident’). We also perform a variety of more traditional superstitious actions, like touching wood, crossing fingers, and so on.
Read MoreA Post by Maks Del Mar.
Recent years have witnessed a surge in studies of the role and value of thought experiments (TEs) in a range of fields, especially in philosophy, history, economics and the natural sciences. Within this literature, however, very little acknowledgement is made of the pervasiveness of TEs in legal practice.[i] This is a great pity, for TEs – in the form of hypothetical variations on existing facts or new and sometimes fanciful hypothetical narratives – are a key mode of legal thought and an important engine of legal change. Whether one looks at legal education (and the Socratic, case-based method), exchanges between Bar and Bench, or the reports of case judgements, one cannot miss just how much the law is full of them. Studying their varieties, and their role and value, in legal thought can thus bring a whole swag of new examples to the interdisciplinary study of uses of the imagination, while of course also illuminating the practice of legal thought itself.
Read MoreA post by Lu Teng.
Sam just broke up with his girlfriend and does not want to go to class this morning. In the past, Sam’s school always closed during severe weather, so he hopes that a blizzard will arrive soon. When Sam looks out the window, this hope causes him to imagine seeing snow. Clearly, Sam’s imagining does not give him justification for believing that it is snowing. But what explains the lack of justificatory power of Sam’s imagining?
Read MoreA post by Jennifer Van Reet
Will you indulge me for a minute? To illustrate and introduce the topic of my post, I have a quick mental exercise for you. (And – full disclosure - I’m also hoping you will share your results so I can collect some anec-data from all you wonderful thinkers who follow this blog.) Are you ready?
Read MoreWhat’s the relation between lying and pretending?
More broadly, what’s the relation between deception of any sort (verbal or otherwise) and the pretend play humans engage in from about 18 months onward?
If you explore the philosophical literatures on deception and on pretense (“pretense” in this context meaning pretend play), you might conclude there’s not an interesting relation to be found. Most philosophical literature that explores pretending makes no effort to shed light on deception. And most philosophical literature on deception and lying is little concerned with pretend play.
Read MoreA post by Neil Sinhababu.
I recently tried on color vision correction glasses that would help me see green for the first time. In addition to being excited about seeing green, I was curious about whether I’d see a color I wasn’t able to imagine before. I think I did! Amy Kind suggested that I tell you about my color imagination experiment, so here I go.
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