A post by Talia Morag.
Philosophers mobilize the term “imagination” for many explanatory tasks, including empathy, mindreading, counterfactual reasoning, and pretending. The recent flourishing of the study of the imagination favors the active exercise of imaginative capacity. When Amy Kind declares this to be the “primary sense” of the imagination, she reflects a contemporary trend (Kind 2013, 145). Kind contrasts this active sense to occasions where ideas “pop” into one’s mind, which she identifies with what Currie and Ravenscroft call “the creative imagination”, that is, “put[ting] together ideas in a way that defies expectation or convention” (Currie & Ravenscroft, 2002, 9). I prefer to call this associative capacity “the passive imagination.”
Read MoreBelow we list some scholarly work on imagination that have been published since our last round-up a year ago. Please feel free to add additional references in the comments!
Read MoreA post by Melvin Chen.
Do androids dream? That is the question that Philip K. Dick’s protagonist Rick Deckard asks himself. Human beings (unless aphantasic) are able to conjure up mental images of the sheep that they count before sleeping. Can machines or programs imagine, daydream, and dream? Mahadevan (2018) proposes that we are at the cusp of imagination science, one of whose primary concerns will be the design of imagination machines.
Read MoreA post by Eric Peterson.
Often when we engage fiction, we feel affect. And often when we engage in modal epistemology, we do not feel affect. Both engaging fiction and modal epistemology seem to be paradigmatic imaginative activities. As Kind (2013) argues, appealing to imagination to explain the role of affect in each case leaves us with two incompatible explanatory roles for imagination. Because of this, it is not clear that we can appeal to imagination in order to account for the disparity of affect between the two imaginative activities. The good news is we do not have to appeal to imagination per se; rather, we can account for the disparity of affect by realizing that philosophical thought experiments act as their own distinct genre.
Read MoreA post by Andrea Halpern.
In a famous anecdote, the 14-year old Mozart is said to have accurately transcribed a complex piece (Miserere by Allergri) he had heard only once (and whose score was a secret closely guarded by the Vatican). Presumably at least part of that feat was accomplished by him “hearing” the piece inside his head. But is that skill confined to certified musical prodigy-geniuses? Not at all. You may wish to think of a favorite tune right now (or a beloved line of poetry… or the sound of fingernails screeching on a blackboard. Sorry.).
Read MoreA post by Amy Kind.
Recently at a conference someone remarked to me that since I’d gotten my PhD back in 1997 – actually, he might have said “way back” – I must have been working on imagination before it became a hot topic in philosophy. And imagination has indeed lately become hot. Though the subject was largely ignored by philosophers throughout most of the twentieth century, it has been the subject of dramatically increased attention over the last twenty-five to thirty years – and especially so over the last decade or so. This chance remark – in addition to reminding me how old I’ve become – got me reflecting on how, exactly, we've gotten to this point, that is, how did imagination come to be as hot as it has become? So I thought I'd use this blog post in an effort to try to answer this question.
Read MoreA post by Aaron Meskin.
A fabulous new cocktail bar opened near my house recently which serves “narrative” cocktails: drinks designed to produce very specific experiences rooted in the story or setting which inspired them. My favorite is 109 Miles to Filey, a drink comprised of seaweed distilled gin, wildflower eau de vie, Islay seafoam, and edible “pebbles”, which is crafted to provide an experience reminiscent of walking on the North Yorkshire coast. Creative, experiential and, I think, centrally involving the imagination, the cocktails at Below Stairs have got me thinking lately about the role of the imagination in eating and drinking.
Read MoreA post by Kathleen Stock.
Scientific models can be physical objects: wind tunnels, scale models, and so on. Equally, they can be presented via descriptions, diagrams, and equations, but not materially instantiated. Examples include Galileo’s famous description of an object moving down an inclined frictionless plane, used to show the effect of gravity on free-falling bodies; Alan Turing’s model of a symmetrical ring of cells to make a point about the mammalian embryo (1952); and John Stuart Mill’s self-interested, exclusively wealth-directed, and wholly rational chooser, “economic man’ (or ‘Homo Economicus’). In all these cases there is no such thing, physically, and nor could there be. Put simply, there are no frictionless planes, ring-shaped embryos (Turing 1952: 56), or wholly rational, exclusively wealth-directed choosers.
Read MoreA post by Julia Jansen.
New models of the mind have conquered much of contemporary research in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. They replace the classical model that, put in very simple terms, pictures the mind as internal to an individual and populated by mental representations. Under the general titles of ‘situated’ cognition or ‘4e’ cognition embedded, embodied, enactive, and extended models have quickly gained currency since the turn of the millennium. What these models share, despite significant differences between them, is the departure from the individualist, internalist, and representationalist models that had reigned for so long. However, while ‘cognition’ is cited as what receives more appropriate and fruitful explanation by these models, imagination is routinely left behind as an ‘offline’ mental activity that, in the absence of its objects and de-coupled from its environment, must rely on representations (‘mental images’) that replace those objects ‘in the imaginer’s mind’.
Read MoreA post by Michela Summa.
While reading a novel, watching a movie or a play, we are often emotionally touched by what is described or represented. This very common phenomenon has prompted a complex and multifaceted debate on the status of so-called “fictional emotions”, i.e., of emotions directed at something merely fictive or imagined (cf. Currie 1990, 182f.; Friend 2016; Gendler and Kovakovich 2005; Radford 1975; Tullmann and Buckwalter 2014; Walton 1978, 1990; Gendler 2010). The main questions raised in this debate are whether these emotions can be considered to be genuine and rationally grounded. These questions are mainly motivated by the two following remarks: (i) fictional emotions are not based on the belief in the existence of what moves us, and (ii) they do not motivate us to act in the same way as emotions for something real or possibly real do.
Read MoreA post by Daniel Dor.
In Dor (2015) and subsequent work, I develop a new general theory of human language and its evolution that I think the readers of this blog may find interesting – because it carries far-reaching implications for our understanding of human imagination, its nature and evolution.
Read MoreA post by Amy Kind
Today we celebrate the first birthday of The Junkyard! We’re very pleased with how our first year went. We have thus far featured Wednesday posts from 41 different authors – scholars ranging from philosophers to psychologists to legal scholars. We’ve also run a book symposium, a roundup of recent work on imagination, and a conference report. There were about 9K unique visitors to our blog in its first year, and almost 23K page views.
Read MoreA post by Dan Cavedon-Taylor.
One issue that has recently gained attention in the literature on mental imagery is the existence of perceptual-imagery hybrids. Consider the following:
Seeing Constellations: Seeing a constellation in the night sky may be partially a matter of projecting into one’s visual experience imagery of lines connecting stars (Briscoe 2011)
Seeing Cats: Seeing a cat that is partially occluded by a picket fence, as a whole object, may be partially a matter of projecting into one’s visual experience imagery of the occluded parts of the cat (Thomas 2009; Nanay 2010; Kind forthcoming)
Avoiding Skunks: Seeing what path to take to avoid a skunk may be partially a matter of projecting into one’s visual experience the trajectory of the skunk’s spray (Van Leeuwen 2011)
The fact that imagery can combine with perception in these ways seems to tell us something important about the nature of mental images: that they are fundamentally perceptual. After all, what imagery does in these examples is aid perception in discharging its essential functions: tracking the objects before us, identifying the objects before us and guiding our actions with respect to those objects.
Read MoreA report prepared by Anna Abraham
On the miserably cold and wet day that was the 16th of March of this year in West Yorkshire, a group of grownups, mostly strangers to one another, assembled together at Leeds Beckett University. The gathering was decidedly mixed, with people hailing from a variety of educational and sociocultural backgrounds, and included members of each circle of the academic world from first year undergraduates to seasoned professors. The congregation had two things in common. All studied, worked or lived in North England. And everyone was there to learn about the human imagination.
Read MoreA post by Claudia Passos-Ferreira.
Can infants imagine? What sort of imaginative phenomenology might they have? The answer is not obvious. For a start, it depends on what we mean by imagination. There is not much evidence that infants can engage in propositional imagination, the cognitive process of imagining that something is the case (e.g., a child imagining that her mother is in the next room). However, infants may have the capacity for sensory imagination, the sensory/motor process of imagining an object with a mental image or imagining an action through motor image (e.g., an infant forming a mental image of her mother’s face when her mother is not present). In this post, I will outline the evidence for these claims, and then explore the question of infants’ imaginative phenomenology.
Read MoreA post by Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei.
When Goethe’s Faust appeals to the ‘wings that lift the mind,’ and Wordsworth describes wandering ‘as a cloud,’ an imagination is invoked that seems to leave behind the limits of the physical world. The truth in these metaphors lies in the fact that we can imaginatively exceed our bodily capacities, thwart physical laws, in contemplating possibilities. Yet in recent decades, the mind itself has come to be understood as embodied and embedded in its world, as correlative to enactive perception. This unraveling of Cartesianism has made embodiment relevant to understanding of imagination in a number of ways. The capacity for internal representation may arise in material interaction with the surrounding environment, conditioning the emergence of imagination in human cognitive evolution. Social empathy for others may be facilitated by responses to their embodied actions and experiences. Literary experience can be understood to draw upon the resources of embodied life, while the body is the medium of expression for many feats of creativity.
Read MoreA post by Anna Abraham.
A 1969 treatise by Jeremy Walker begins as follows. “One of the most striking features of nearly all philosophical psychologies has been their failure to deal at all adequately with imagination … This 'conspiracy of silence' is puzzling, and I can think of no hypothesis to account for it. For it cannot be denied that imagination is a power, or web of powers, which plays a central part in the structure of human activity and consciousness; and so a failure to consider this power adequately must lead to a philosopher's giving a distorted, or one-sided, account of the distinctively human. For the powers of imagination are clearly related in a close and complex way with the other central human powers, such as belief, the passions, intention and the will. And it follows that any philosopher who systematically underplays the role of imagination must at some point introduce a corresponding distortion into his account of, say, the role of belief or the role of intention in human affairs” (Walker, 1969: 575).
Substitute the term ‘philosopher’ with ‘psychologist’ in this passage, and the accusation holds water. Down to the present day.
Read MoreA post by Jennifer A. McMahon.
Art or fiction considered as a source of information, say as historical artefact, reporting or journalism is different from art as insightful. The former can be expressed as a series of propositions, the latter not. It is the latter that concerns me here.
Read MoreA post by James O. Young.
Philosophers from Aristotle onwards have held that reading literary fiction can make people more virtuous. Nussbaum (1990) was among the first contemporary philosophers to maintain that literary fiction is a valuable source of moral knowledge. On her view, reading literary fiction assists readers to understand social situations and to understand the complexities of making moral decisions. Similarly, Currie (1995) believes that imagining ourselves in the situations of fictional characters can lead to moral growth. Other philosophers, such as Vogler (2007), have been sceptical about the suggestion that reading literary fiction has any moral benefits. She believes that time spent reading literary fiction is, from a moral point of view, wasted. The only way to become more virtuous she believes, is to perform virtuous acts. She writes that, for example, “if I seek to cultivate generosity, I give….Since silent reading induces retreat from my circumstances, silent reading is the opposite of habituating myself to noticing what’s going on in my world by noticing.” (Vogler 2007: 33) The hypothesis that reading literary fiction makes readers more virtuous is an empirical hypothesis. The most recent empirical evidence suggests that it is true.
Read MoreA post by Emine Hande Tuna.
The phenomenon of imaginative resistance (IR) has been discussed in some other Junkyard posts, such as Eric Peterson’s post which examines implicit IR, Kengo Miyazono’s post about truth in fiction, Margherita Arcangeli’s commentary on Kathleen Stock's recent book, Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination, which touches on the issue of IR since it is the topic of Stock’s fourth chapter. Here, I will attempt an alternative interpretation of the phenomenon.
Read More