As we return from our winter hiatus with our first posts of the decade, this week The Junkyard gets into the retrospective spirit. We asked five friends of the blog – Peter Langland-Hassan, Margherita Arcangeli, Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, and Bence Nanay – to reflect on the previous decade and give us a “Top Five” list relating to imagination. There were no other requirements – we thought we’d give them free rein to come up with whatever they wanted, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s an interesting set of ruminations. We’ll be running one of these lists each day this week. Next week, we’ll resume our regular weekly postings. Today is Aaron Meskin’s Top Five Imagination List (plus a bonus).
Read MoreFive Top Fives: Imaginative Edible Concoctions of the Decade
As we return from our winter hiatus with our first posts of the decade, this week The Junkyard gets into the retrospective spirit. We asked five friends of the blog – Peter Langland-Hassan, Margherita Arcangeli, Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, and Bence Nanay – to reflect on the previous decade and give us a “Top Five” list relating to imagination. There were no other requirements – we thought we’d give them free rein to come up with whatever they wanted, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s an interesting set of ruminations. We’ll be running one of these lists each day this week. Next week, we’ll resume our regular weekly postings. Today is Sam Liao with a list on Imaginative Edible Concoctions of the Decade.
Read MoreFive Top Fives: Quotes and Songs
As we return from our winter hiatus with our first posts of the decade, this week The Junkyard gets into the retrospective spirit. We asked five friends of the blog – Peter Langland-Hassan, Margherita Arcangeli, Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, and Bence Nanay – to reflect on the previous decade and give us a “Top Five” list relating to imagination. There were no other requirements – we thought we’d give them free rein to come up with whatever they wanted, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s an interesting set of ruminations. We’ll be running one of these lists each day this week. Next week, we’ll resume our regular weekly postings. Today is Margherita Arcangeli with a list on Quotes and Songs.
Read MoreFive Top Fives: Approximately Five Papers capturing the Zeitgeist within a certain area of imagination-studies: 2010-2019
As we return from our winter hiatus with our first posts of the decade, this week The Junkyard gets into the retrospective spirit. We asked five friends of the blog – Peter Langland-Hassan, Margherita Arcangeli, Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, and Bence Nanay – to reflect on the previous decade and give us a “Top Five” list relating to imagination. There were no other requirements – we thought we’d give them free rein to come up with whatever they wanted, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s an interesting set of ruminations. We’ll be running one of these lists each day this week. Next week, we’ll resume our regular weekly postings. Today is Peter Langland-Hassan with a list on Approximately Five Papers capturing the Zeitgeist within a certain area of imagination-studies: 2010-2019.
Read MoreWhy We Hate Spoilers
(Spoiler: it has to do with belief and imagining)
A post by Neil Van Leeuwen.
Most of us don’t like having a plot spoiled. We hate spoilers. For example, if you and I were going to see Hamlet (suppose you hadn’t seen or read it yet), and if I told you before the final act (spoiler alert!) that Hamlet dies, you would likely be annoyed. But why? You were going to learn what happens anyway. Why get so worked up?
I think that in order to explain why so many people hate spoilers, we (as theorists) have to appeal both to people’s beliefs about what happens in stories and to their vivid and rich imaginings. This position, if I am right, shows that a (more or less) tacit dichotomy that’s been running through recent posts here on The Junkyard is false.
Read MoreDaydreaming, philosophy and the logics of the imagination
A post by Felipe Morales Carbonell.
Daydreaming gives, I’ll argue, a model for some large-scale features of philosophy, and it presents a challenge to the recent project of developing what is called the logic of the imagination. Both claims may seem, admittedly, fairly ambitious; I will be happy if I manage to offer the barest sketch of an argument for these points.
Read MoreImaginary Truths
A post by Alon Chasid.
Suppose you’re imagining a proposition, e.g., that Bernie Sanders is the current US President, that the price of coffee beans is falling, or that there are gold nuggets in a certain river. Ordinarily, you can correctly recount what you’ve imagined. But suppose you are asked whether the proposition you imagined was true in the relevant ‘imaginary world,’ the ‘world’ of your imaginative project. This question, without further qualification, may strike you as odd, probably because you take the answer to be trivial: it is obvious, you assume, that the proposition you imagined was true in the relevant imaginary world (henceforth: ‘i-world’). After all, you imagined it to be true. Imagining that p, you assume, renders p true in the imaginative project’s i-world.
This view is mistaken. Imagining a proposition doesn’t render that proposition true in the pertinent i-world. I don’t deny that to imagine a proposition is to imagine it to be true in the i-world. My claim is that it doesn’t follow from this that the imagined proposition is true in the i-world. Compare: to believe a proposition is to believe it to be true (i.e., true simpliciter, in the real world), but believing a proposition does not render the believed proposition true.
Read MorePretense and the Enactivist Explanatory Reversal
A post by Zuzanna Rucinska.
What is the child doing when she is pretending that a banana is a 'telephone', a pen is a 'rocket', or an empty chair is occupied by an 'imaginary friend'?
The enactive approach to cognition offers a new way to answer these questions. According to enactivism, cognition is constituted by a dynamic interaction between agents and their physical and social environments, and perception and action are inextricably linked together. This will hold for pretense as well.
Pretense is part of children's cognitive development, and belongs to many cultural repertoires. As it encompasses a many distinct activities, from object-substitution play to complex role-play and imaginary play (see Liao & Gendler 2010, for an overview) I think of it as a broad and non-standardized practice, with capacities for representational thought gradually emerging from, as opposed to presupposing, it.
In this post, I will bring up two challenges relevant to pretense: 1) the bypassing challenge, and 2) the absence challenge. I will suggest how enactivists can deal with these challenges. An important role will be played by re-formulating the explanandum and really looking at what children are doing when engaging in pretend play.
Read MorePerspectives are subjective, but not private
A post by Heidi L. Maibom.
In my last post, I criticized the distinction made in social psychology between imagine-self and imagine-other perspective taking. The problem is this. Imagine-other perspective taking, as described, does not actually have to involve perspective taking at all. Why not? Because all you are asked to do is to consider more closely the other person’s situation. But to do so one does not have to take on the other person’s perspective at all. If you, like me, believe that there is no God’s Eye perspective or perspective from nowhere, you should agree that we usually consider others from our own perspectives. I call this perspective on others a ‘third-person perspective.’ To take the other person’s own perspective, we have to consider the other person’s situation as if it were our own. We have to consider it from what I call a ‘first-person perspective.’
Read MoreThe Imaginative Scope and Anatomy of the Poetic Brain
A post by John F. DeCarlo.
Synthesizing the Enlightenment and the counter-currents of Romanticism, Lou Andreas Salome, the Russian free thinker who stirred the affection and admiration of Nietzsche, Freud, and Rilke, astutely defined poetry as: “somewhere between the dream and its interpretation”.[i] Correspondingly, I will explore the unique and significant functions that the poetic imagination plays relative to scientific brain-mind models, advancing the view that the poetic imagination is both a reflection of -- and reflection on – the processes of brain-mind-world.
Read MoreLiterary Experience and Affective Responses
A post by Julia Langkau.
In his post ‘Choosing your own adventure?’, Peter Langland-Hassan argued that our affective responses to fiction are driven by our beliefs about the content of the fiction rather than by what we imagine, and in last week’s post, Luke Roelofs appealed to the fact that fiction is an ‘objective social entity’ and that our desire to ‘align our imaginings with others’ might explain why simply imagining a happier ending of Romeo and Juliet after having watched the play will not make us feel better. I will suggest yet another explanation of this phenomenon, and my explanation is based on how we engage with and experience literary works like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Read MoreChoice and Constraint in Fiction
A post by Luke Roelofs.
In last week’s post, Peter Langland-Hassan presented an argument for revising the widely-accepted view that emotional responses to fiction are driven by imagination. Rather, he argues, they are driven by beliefs - beliefs about the content of the fiction.
Although I disagree with Peter, I hope he may find this post indirectly supportive, since in trying to resist his argument, I find potentially revisionary implications in the opposite direction: rather than belief taking over what we thought was imagination’s domain, imagination might spill into territory we thought belonged to belief.
Read MoreChoosing Your Own Adventure?
A post by Peter Langland-Hassan.
We can choose what to imagine. Therefore, if the affect we experience in response to a fiction depends on what we are imagining, we should be able to choose the affect we experience in response to a fiction. But we cannot choose the affect we experience in response to a fiction. Thus, by modus tollens: our affective responses to fiction do not depend on what we are imagining.
Read MoreHow to Distinguish Belief from Imagination
A post by Kengo Miyazono.
Normally we have no difficulty in distinguishing what we believe from what we imagine. We seem to have a reliable metacognitive capacity that enables us to distinguish our beliefs from our imaginings. I can easily judge that “the university library is closed today” is something I believe and that “I am the best football player in the world” is something I imagine. But how exactly do I do this? How exactly do I distinguish beliefs from imaginings?
Read MoreConference Report: Imagination and Social Change
A report by Amy Kind.
Last spring, in a video called “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” a graying and much older AOC recounts how the country was finally able to achieve environmental reforms. As she rides the bullet train from NY to DC several decades from now, she recalls the diverse group of people who took congressional office in 2019. Young people of color across the country were finally able to see themselves reflected in their political leaders. This gave rise to new hopes and dreams for, as AOC notes, it’s often said that “you can’t be what you can’t see.” And this leads her to draw an analogy to the Green New Deal. The criticisms that arose when it was first proposed came from the fact that people just couldn’t picture it yet. After telling the story of how significant reforms were finally enacted, she notes that: “The first big step was just closing our eyes and imagining.”
Read MoreEthics of Scientific Imagination: Who Gets to Use Imagination in Science?
A post by Mike Stuart.
Scientists imagine a lot. They imagine to come up with new research problems, design experiments, interpret data, troubleshoot, draft papers and presentations, and give feedback to each other. But what kinds of imagination are used in science? When do scientists feel it is appropriate to employ imagination, and when not? How are the tricks of the imaginative trade taught?
Answers to these questions require data that we don’t currently have. There is research done on imagination in animals, non-scientists (especially young children), and studies focusing on science students, but there are no in-vivo sociological studies on the role of imagination in practicing scientists. Since 2015, I have been trying to perform my own sociological research (interviews and observations) on scientists, including mathematicians, biologists, geologists and physicists. In this post I want to talk about an early but provocative finding.
Read MorePretending with no mental images
A post by Monika Chylińska.
As children, my brothers and I used to play a game of pretense in which we were surrounded by sharks. We would bounce vigorously on a large rubber ring (similar to this one but three times bigger), expecting one of us to fall down or touch the ground with a foot or a hand. Falling down meant being eaten by sharks (sudden death); touching the ground with a body part meant that the sharks had bitten off that part. We greatly enjoyed all the elements of our pretense: the jumping, the falling, the shouting. There was no goal to be the survivor because there was no goal except for fun. Even after being 'annihilated' one was back right away, bouncing with the rest.
Pretending to be dealing with sharks or any other dangerous phenomena seems to be a common practice among children. You likely also played it or something like it too. If you did, I am curious whether you recall your mental experience of such play. Let me be more clear about my curiosity: Did you objectually imagine sharks (or aliens, or lava, etc.)? Did you picture them in your mind or projected their image onto something?
Read MoreIncrementalist Imagination
A post by Shen-yi Liao.
1. To Change the World, Imagine Differently
Nothing is more free than the imagination of man, said Hume. We use imagination as our tool for accessing possibilities other than the actual, times other than the present, and perspectives other than our own. Imagination’s power takes us beyond things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are.
Given this power, it is no surprise that imagination often comes up in discussions about how to ameliorate our social ills. Imagination lets us transcend reality, to travel to a better world in our heads, a world that we might one day make. “Moral imagination”, “political imagination”, or whatever its name, the thought remains the same: to change the world, imagine differently.
Read MoreThe Value of a Free and Wandering Mind
A post by Miriam McCormick.
Is there a place in the mind where we are free to let our thoughts go, where normative judgments and assessments are out of place, and where praise and shame do not apply? Much recent work, including my own, has been concerned with widening the scope of agency beyond that which is under our direct voluntary control. Many states of mind, including beliefs, emotions, and desires, are appropriate targets of certain reactive attitudes, even if such states cannot be directly controlled.
Read MoreRecent Work on Religious Imagination
A post by Guy Axtell.
The role of imagination in religious consciousness is a topic of interest in philosophy and psychology of religion, religious studies, and theology. Study of religious imagination often goes together with phenomenology of religious experience, with the study of religious art, and with theologies emphasizing hermeneutics, or model-theoretic tasks.[i] My studies of the literature of religious imagination lead me to think that attitudes among theologians towards imagination’s role in the formation of religious ideas are often captive to broader differences between liberal and conservative theologies.[ii] This is seen to some extent across the Abrahamic family of testimonial traditions.[iii]
Read More