A post by Adam Morton.
Some acts of imagination are so ordinary that we hardly notice them. Some of them are never noticed because they are not conscious. Unconscious perceptual imagination is probably controversial (but see below). On the other hand imagining physical actions, of oneself or other people, seems to be both a very familiar part of life and not to fit a standard idea of what is conscious. Not conscious experience at any rate. One form it takes when the imaginer imagines herself is rehearsal. You are preparing to do something, or anticipating having to do it, and you pause while the things you will have to do and their sequence get organized in your mind. You may have conscious images of yourself performing the acts, or of sensations in your muscles. But you may well not: you simply wait while something happens, and then you are ready to go.
Read MoreA post by Michael Brent.
When imagining is a conscious mental action we perform, we typically bring content to mind and manipulate the qualitative features that such content possesses, and we do so intentionally. Right now, for instance, I am imagining the visual appearance of my old friend Matt, my flatmate in graduate school. I have intentionally brought to mind an image of Matt smiling, standing in the kitchen of our apartment, cooking dinner. With relative ease, I can manipulate the qualitative features of this image, now imagining him wearing his favourite t-shirt, now imagining him cooking risotto, and now imagining him drinking from a glass of wine. (Life in graduate school was tough, I know.) All of this imagining is intentional mental action, par excellence. How, exactly, do we do this? That is, how do we bring content to mind when intentionally imagining something?
Read MoreA post by Catherine Wearing.
There’s some disagreement in the literature as to whether supposing and imagining are distinct activities, and if they are, what exactly distinguishes them. But one fairly widespread point of agreement is that supposing is less constrained than imagining: we can suppose things that we can’t imagine. And not only does supposing seem to be less constrained than imagining, it is often taken to be completely unconstrained. One can suppose anything, even a contradiction, if it’s for the sake of carrying out a proof by reductio ad absurdum.
Read MoreA post by Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini.
Fake news can be found everywhere, from traditional news outlets to personal websites and social media. Examples of fake news are conspiracy theories, trolls’ social media campaigns, and many of RT’s headlines. There is now a vibrant debate on how to define the term ‘fake news’. Here I will attempt to shed some light on the type of speech act the term ‘fake news’ refers to by looking at the kind of reactions this speech act is meant to elicit in the audience.
Read MoreA post by Julia Langkau.
Imagine walking through a winter landscape: there is fresh snow on the trees, on the hills and rocks around you, and in the background, you see the snow-covered mountains. It has stopped snowing and a little bit of blue sky and sunlight is getting through the clouds and reflecting in the snow.
Read MoreA post by Shen-yi Liao.
As you may have seen by now, there is a new Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on imagination. (For comparison, you can still access the archived old entry.) In this post—speaking only for myself—I want to talk about the main changes and their rationales; and also invite this blog’s community for suggestions for further improving this resource.
Read MoreA post by Luke Roelofs.
Can imagination make a difference to what you ought to think or do, even when you don’t imagine anything?
I’m assuming here that, as several philosophers have recently argued (e.g. Dorsch 2016, Williamson 2016, Kind 2016, 2018) properly-constrained imagination (meaning roughly ‘imagination that seeks to accurately match some part of reality) can have epistemically and practically significant results.
Read MoreA post by Bartek Chomanski.
In this post, I argue that the phenomenological similarity between imaginative, recollective, and perceptual experiences is a complex matter, and that accounting for it is made difficult by empirical data which suggests that there is closer similarity between imagination and perception, and imagination and memory, than there is between memory and perception. I then explain why I think the empirical results raise a potential problem for a certain style of accounting for this similarity and sketch some solutions.
Read MoreA post by Mike Stuart.
I recently co-organized a conference with Fiora Salis to bring together philosophers of science and philosophers of art working on imagination. In this post, I want to explore an exchange that took place between a philosopher and a scientist during that conference.
Read MoreA Post by Felipe De Brigard.
Our tendency to imagine alternative ways in which past personal events could have occurred instead is frequent and ubiquitous. Traditionally, researchers have argued that these episodic counterfactual thoughts play at least two fundamental functional roles in human psychology (Roese, 1997). On the one hand, upward and additive counterfactuals, which tend to generate negative emotions (e.g., regret), are thought to serve a preparative function in anticipation of similar events that may occur in the future. The idea, to put it simply, is that mentally simulating episodic counterfactual thoughts helps us try out hypothetical versions of events that may re-occur in the future. On the other hand, downward and subtractive counterfactuals, which tend to generate positive emotions (e.g., relief), are thought to serve an affective function in helping agents feel better about their experienced outcomes. However, certain results have proved difficult to explain by this traditional view. For instance, it has been shown that not all downward counterfactuals produced the positive emotions previously associated with their affective role, and that not all upward counterfactuals generated the motivational affect previously associated with their preparative role.
Read MoreA post by Fiora Salis.
The problem of how scientists gain knowledge of reality through imagination in scientific models is still largely unresolved. Consider the Lotka-Volterra model of predator-prey dynamics. The model is usually identified with two differential equations interpreted as describing the growth rates of two populations, one prey and one predator, dynamically interacting with each other. To facilitate mathematical treatment, the model makes a number of assumptions, including that predators have infinite appetite, prey have limitless supplies of food, and the environment never changes. These assumptions enable the isolation of certain features of predator-prey interaction (including for example the density of the two populations) not by abstracting away from some particular predators and prey interacting with each other, but by stipulating that some populations having certain features interact in such and such a way. These assumptions, of course, are false (the idealized populations do not exist in reality), but they are not lies either. They are the product of creative uses of imagination that divert from reality to generate a model system as the object of study. They describe two imaginary populations interacting with each other under imaginary conditions. And this enables the generation of certain hypotheses and the assessment of their truth-likeness. The model predicts that the dynamic interaction between predators and prey will show a cyclical relationship in their numbers. Imagination is therefore vital both to the construction and development of the model and to the generation of plausible hypotheses.
Read MoreA Post by Magdalena Balcerak Jackson.
I am standing in front of the classroom with my co-teacher Sara, a smart female graduate student. It is her turn to lead the discussion today. She explains all the ideas and arguments clearly and competently. Most students listen and cooperate. And yet, two male undergraduates keep interrupting her, making provocative, unhelpful comments and undermining her. I see her getting more and more insecure about how to deal with the situation. As I stand in the corner observing, I ask myself: What to do?
Read MoreA post by Jennifer Van Reet.
My own thinking about how pretense is represented has certainly evolved over the years. Most recently, my conception most closely resembles Picciuto and Carruthers (2016)’s characterization of pretense as a state of “embodied imagination” in which individuals “act as if P (without believing it) while imagining that P”. What I appreciate about this characterization is how it makes clear that imagining is a necessary component of pretending, but that pretending is something more, and thus, different from imagining. Picciuto and Carruthers clearly specify how “acting as if” can mean not acting at all (e.g., when you pretend to sleep by lying completely still) or not acting any differently from how one would act in the real world (e.g., when you pretend to have painted fingernails just by acting like you).
Read MoreA Post by Max Jones and Tom Schoonen.
If we want to use our imagination to acquire knowledge, it has to be constrained (Kind 2016). After all, if the imagination were completely unconstrained then it would be equally likely to generate truths as falsehoods; possibilities as impossibilities. Some of the constraints on the imagination are within our control. When we’re imagining whether we can visit each other this weekend, it serves us well to constrain our imagination to be reality-oriented. Yet, on other occasions, we might choose to imagine being able to instantly transport ourselves from Amsterdam to Leeds and back. Importantly, these constraints cannot be too tightly under our control: if we always imagine what we intend to imagine, imagination can’t give us anything more than was already part of our intentions (Langland-Hassan 2016).
Read MoreA post by Christopher Gauker.
A softball player can visualize the trajectory of a fly ball and her own spatial relation to the ball and by means of that visualization arrive at the spot where it will approach the ground just in time to catch it.
An experienced builder of bird houses can knock out a pretty good bird house without having to measure all the pieces, just by visualizing the pieces he needs and cutting them to size accordingly.
I can take apart a leaky faucet and replace the washer and then put it back together again. In doing this, I form a sequence of mental images representing the pieces and the order in which they came apart. After replacing the washer I play this mental movie in reverse, until the faucet has been reassembled.
Our ability to solve problems on the basis of visualizations in this way depends on the visual knowledge we have of how things move around and interact in space. Our possession of this knowledge is most evident in the distinctions we draw between visualizations of realistic sequences of events and visualizations of fantastic sequences of events.
Read MoreA post by Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and María Jimena Clavel Vázquez
It is commonplace to hear that meaningfully understanding each other requires us to walk in each other's shoes. But what does this mean? Presumably, when asking someone to walk in our shoes, we are asking her to inhabit our perspective: not simply to imagine the sort of circumstances I'm facing, but to imagine what it is like for me to face the sort of circumstances I'm facing. We can say that engaging with perspectives different from our own involves an exercise of imagination that goes beyond imagining that something is the case. Imaginatively engaging with different perspectives involves vividly imagining what it is like to inhabit a different perspective, it involves summoning the relevant affective responses to the circumstances others encounter. And this exercise of imagination is not trivial: it seems to be involved in empathizing with others, in moral imagination, and in our engagement with fiction.
Read MoreA post by Greg Currie.
I have argued for a certain view about what goes on when, while sitting in the theatre, we “want Desdemona to be saved” as we might unguardedly put it. On my view, this is a case of what is called desire in imagination or sometimes i-desire. And on that view i-desire is not desire. I-desires stand to desires as imaginings stand to beliefs.
Read MoreThe Junkyard will be on hiatus for the next month. We will return in August with new weekly postings. We have an exciting lineup for the fall with posts by Adriana Clavel-Vazquez, Christopher Gauker, Max Jones, Jennifer Van Reet, Magdalena Balcerak Jackson, Fiora Salis, Felipe de Brigard, Mike Stuart, Bartek Chomanski, Luke Roelofs, Shen-yi Liao, Julia Langkau, Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini, Catherine Wearing, Michael Brent, Adam Morton, Shannon Spaulding, and Neil Van Leeuwen.
Read MoreA post by Peter Langland-Hassan.
If you have seen The Big Lebowski, you know that The Dude hates The Eagles. Being sympathetic to The Dude, I don’t want him to hear the Eagles any more than he has to. Here are three competing options—following Gregory Currie (2010)—for characterizing my desire:
Read MoreA post by Thomas Szanto.
In the face of an ever-thriving research on imagination as well as on collective intentionality, memory and collective emotions, it is rather surprising that hardly anybody has yet systematically inquired whether and how individuals could collectively perform acts of imagination.
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