A post by Matthew MacKisack.
In this post I am going to discuss the procedural narratives of visual artists with aphantasia, ‘a condition of reduced or absent voluntary imagery’ (Zeman et al 2015, p1). With the aim of finding out how aphantasia informs the individual’s creative process, I will focus on a claim that appears several times in the narratives: that the pictures the artists make stand in for or somehow supplant the mental imagery they lack. I will explore what could be meant by this, suggest an answer, then conclude by looking at how the answer might square with aphantasia being specifically a deficit of voluntary imagery. The post is a sketch for a more comprehensive qualitative study - comments and suggestions are very welcome.
Read MoreA post by Amy Kind
Today we celebrate The Junkyard’s second birthday. A year ago, I reported some stats on The Junkyard’s first year. At that time, there had been about 9K unique visitors to the blog. We’ve had similar traffic in year two. As of the writing of this post, there have been over 18K unique visitors to the blog. These visitors have come from over 50 different countries. Though the vast majority of our visitors have come from the United States and the UK, we also seem to receive a fair amount of traffic from (in order): Canada, Israel, Germany, Japan, Australia, and Italy.
Read MoreA post by Andrea Sauchelli.
Can you really imagine being someone else—mind you, not just suppose that you are someone else, but imagine being an altogether different person? In what sense and to what degree can we actually achieve this task? What are the theoretical consequences of episodes of imagining being someone else for the contemporary debate on personal identity?
Read MoreA post by Sridhar Mahadevan.
We discuss a fundamental challenge for artificial intelligence (AI) enabled systems: can machines imagine? According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “to imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are… to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one’s own.”[1] Art is perhaps the paradigmatic example of human imagination. Figure 1 shows an untitled painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that sold at a recent auction in New York City for over $100 million.
The scope of imagination in human society goes far beyond art: numerous examples can be given to illustrate that human achievements in the sciences, technology, literature, sculpture, poetry, religion, and beyond, depend fundamentally on our ability to imagine. The importance of imagination to humans naturally raises the question of whether intelligent machines can be endowed with similar abilities.
Read MoreA post by Razvan Sofroni.
It has been only a few years since the idea that imagination might be a source of non-modal knowledge started to be taken seriously again. Up until now, however, the focus has been almost exclusively on non-normative knowledge (Kind 2016, Kind and Kung 2016, McPherson and Dorsch 2018). In this post, I’d like to explore the idea that imagination might be a source of moral knowledge and address possible reasons to resist its appeal.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Margherita Arcangeli’s recent book: Supposition and the Imaginative Realm (Routledge, 2018). See here for an introduction from Margherita. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.
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Commentary from Kathleen Stock.
I’m delighted to contribute to this symposium. The book is a fantastic addition to the literature on the nature of supposition. My aim in this piece is to outline what I take to be Margherita’s view, and contrast it informatively with my own.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Margherita Arcangeli’s recent book: Supposition and the Imaginative Realm (Routledge, 2018). See here for an introduction from Margherita. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.
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Commentary from Amy Kind.
It’s a pleasure to be taking part in this symposium on Margherita Arcangeli’s Supposition and the Imaginative Realm, a book that is sure to generate much interest and discussion. As Margherita indicated in her opening post [insert link] for the symposium, she ultimately defends a view according to which supposition is a sui generis type of imagination, in particular, it is acceptance-like imagination. Though such a view had previously been hinted at by authors such as Kevin Mulligan, as far as I know Margherita is the first to develop this kind of view in detail.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Margherita Arcangeli’s recent book: Supposition and the Imaginative Realm (Routledge, 2018). See here for an introduction from Margherita. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.
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Commentary from Steve Humbert-Droz.
In her excellent monograph, Margherita Arcangeli argues in favour of a positive account of supposition that aims at situating this phenomenon within the imaginative domain. Embracing a simulationist approach of imagination, she debunks faulty desiderata on imagination used against the imaginative account of supposition (Part. I) and argues that supposition is a re-creative state of acceptance (Part. II). She also makes a valuable contribution to the literature by showing against a widespread view that supposition is more demanding than merely entertaining a content (§ 5.2).
Supposition and the Imaginative Realm is, in my opinion, an important book and the best existing defense of the imaginative account of supposition.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Margherita Arcangeli’s recent book: Supposition and the Imaginative Realm (Routledge, 2018). Today we begin with an introduction from Margherita. Commentaries and replies will appear Tuesday through Thursday.
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The fundamental question that drives my inquiry is: What is supposition? This is a crucial and pressing question, if we consider that while supposition has been frequently invoked as a key notion in many philosophical debates in different domains (e.g., aesthetics, logic, phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science), we lack a consensual characterisation of supposition. There is a tendency to contrast supposition with imagination, but most of the time this is not premised on a detailed analysis. It may well be, indeed, that supposition is rather a type of imagination. The book offers an extensive analysis of supposition that does justice to its place in the architecture of the mind. My main goal is to show that there are good arguments in favour of the view that supposition is a type of imagination, but that these very arguments also suggest that supposition is a specific type of imagination, distinct from other varieties of imagination recognised by the literature.
Read MoreA post by Uku Tooming.
It is intuitive to think that grasping the aesthetic value of something – be it an artefact or a natural object – requires first-hand experience. For instance, it seems problematic to say: “That painting is beautiful, although I have not seen it”. This idea has found its formulation in the so-called Acquaintance Principle (AP). Take an influential statement of the principle by Richard Wollheim:
judgements of aesthetic value, unlike judgements of moral knowledge, must be based on first-hand experience of their objects and are not, except within very narrow limits, transmissible from one person to another. (Wollheim 1980, 233)
Both the content and status of AP are under debate. It may be treated as an epistemic principle concerning aesthetic knowledge or justification, or a non-epistemic principle concerning the acceptable way of making aesthetic judgments. In the context of this blog post, I try to avoid these intricacies and focus on the general idea that first-hand experience of an object is necessary for aesthetic appreciation.
Read MoreA post by Sophie Grace Chappell.
Part 3 of 3
In my first post I introduced the notion of imaginative identification, and said how crucial I think it is for ethics; but I also suggested that most modern moral philosophy has not made good sense of imaginative identification. I see six reasons for this failure. Last time I discussed the first three of these reasons, which come from the nature of imaginative identification. In this third and final post I’ll look at the three reasons for the failure that come from the nature of moral philosophy.
Read MoreA post by Sophie Grace Chappell.
Part 2 of 3
In my first post I introduced the notion of imaginative identification, and said how crucial I think it is for ethics. I also suggested, by reference to examples, that for the most part, modern moral philosophy has not made good sense of imaginative identification. That raises the question why not.
Read MoreA post by Sophie Grace Chappell.
Part 1 of 3
One of the main concerns of ethics, as ordinary good people do it, is the activity that we may call imaginative identification: understanding, getting a feel for, learning vicariously and fictively to inhabit not only my own point of view, but other people’s points of view too. “You don’t know what it was like, you weren’t there”, we say, and “It’s easy to say that when you’re not in my shoes”, and “Try and see it from her point of view”, and “You’re right from your side. I’m right from mine”, and “How would you like it if I did that to you?”. I would say (though other commentators have, implicitly, disagreed) that the Golden Rule propounded by Jesus in Matthew 7.12 (and elsewhere by Confucius, Rabbi Hillel, and many other moral teachers) is about the same thing: about imagining what it would be like to be someone else, and thinking what I would want and not want to happen to me if I were that other person.
Read MoreA post by Jessica Black.
Imaginative resistance (IR) has been addressed various times in this forum, namely by Kengo Miyazono, Eric Peterson, Kathleen Stock, Emine Hande Tuna, and most recently by Hanna Kim. With the exception of Kim’s explanation of her recent work with Markus Kneer and Mike Stuart, the treatments of IR have been exclusively philosophical. Some pose questions that have been—to varying degrees—tested empirically in our lab, although much of our results remain unpublished. In this post I will share some of our more intriguing findings, some of which attempt to probe the phenomenon of IR directly, and others which are relatively independent of philosophical debates. I hope these will raise more questions about the causes and consequences of IR, especially as it appears in cases outside of the more traditional philosophical thought experiments.
Read MoreA post by John F. DeCarlo.
The famed Shakespearean actor, Edmund Kean, supposedly declared on his death bed: “dying is easy; comedy is hard.” Might the same be said about ‘doing’ science? For while Newtonian equations are still used for their ease and quickness, they are conditionally limited, and fundamentally, misleading. Accordingly, I would like to address the Quine/Duhem Paradox and offer a critical evaluation of the Bayesian response of abiding by self-credences and offer an alternative procedural methodology.
Read MoreAccording to a very popular view of imagining, belief and knowledge, the three dramatically contrast with one another.
For example in his poem L’enfant (‘The child’)), Maurice Carême implicitly opposes, through a careful word choice, on the one hand beliefs about the actual observable world, knowledge, objectivity and shared perspective; and on the other hand what the child imagines when he closes his eyes and plays, a world to which only he has access through his mind’s eye.
Read MoreA post by Hanna Kim.
The phenomenon of imaginative resistance has been widely discussed in the philosophical literature, including a number of times on this blog (e.g., see here, here, and here). Imaginative resistance has been defined as occurring “when an otherwise competent imaginer finds it difficult to engage in some sort of prompted imaginative activity” (Gendler and Liao 2016). And one of the oldest and most widely discussed puzzles concerning the phenomenon has to do with an asymmetry between imagining counterevaluative propositions and imagining counterdescriptive propositions (Hume 1757, Moran 1994, Walton 1990, Gendler 2000). The empirical assumption underlying the puzzle is that people experience more imaginative resistance when they attempt to imagine scenarios that are evaluatively deviant (counterevaluative) rather than descriptively deviant (counterdescriptive). This “curious asymmetry” (Kieran and Lopes 2003, 8; Matravers 2003, 91) has been widely observed, not very often argued for, and frequently restricted to moral deviance. Given this backdrop, my collaborators, Markus Kneer and Mike Stuart, and I wondered: What motivates this asymmetry? Why should it be any more difficult to imagine a countermoral claim (or counterevaluative claim more generally) than it is to imagine a counterdescriptive claim? Could the puzzle, according to which a difference in imaginative resistance is due exclusively, or at the very least predominantly, to claim type (i.e., evaluative vs. descriptive) largely be a myth?
Read MoreThe Junkyard will be on hiatus for the next month. We will return in mid-January with new weekly postings.
Read MoreA post by Neil Van Leeuwen.
The question I’m thinking of was probably rhetorical. I want to answer it directly nonetheless. But before I can quote the question usefully, I have to do some set-up.
The general issue is the psychology of how humans comprehend fiction. What, for example, are the key features of mental states that encode ideas like Hermione knows spells or Bilbo is a Hobbit or Mark Zuckerberg wore pajamas to an important business meeting (with the last being prompted not by reality but by the 2010 film Social Network)?
Read MoreBelow we list some scholarly works on imagination that have recently been published (see also our previous roundups here and here). Please feel free to add additional references in the comments!
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