A Post by Derek Brown.
1. Make-perceive
I am in my office, staring at its off-white walls, and imagining how the walls would look with more photos of my son on them. Impressive? Seemingly not. Briscoe (2008) calls cases like this, where imaginings are placed into the spatiotemporal region of occurrent perceptions, make-perceive. In this example, the imagined photos have some notable features:
In addition, it is reasonable to suppose that:
2. Make-perceive on steroids?
It has been argued that imagination can impact perception in more robust and systemic ways. For this post I will focus on two phenomena:
cognitively penetrated colour perceptions or ‘memory colour’ effects (Macpherson 2012)[1]
amodal completions (Nanay 2010; Briscoe 2011, 2018)
Read MoreIn this post, we list some scholarly works on imagination that have been published since our previous update. Please feel free to add additional references in the comments!
Read MoreA post by Anna Welpinghus.
Most readers of this blog will be familiar with the basic idea behind implicit bias: Societies are structured by social hierarchies, which leaves traces in the minds of its members. These can operate to some degree independently from our explicit convictions. Hence, they can lead to discriminating behavior, often without intention.
In my paper “The Imagination Model of Implicit Bias” (2019). I argued that we have good reasons to assume that imagination plays a vital role in decision making. Furthermore, if this assumption is correct, it offers an explanation for implicit bias in many considered decisions. In this blog post, I summarize the proposal of the paper and then reflect on some issues that came up in it.
Read MoreA post by Joanna Ahlberg.
In the past twenty years or so, we have seen an increasing interest in a type of image-free imagination commonly referred to as Propositional Imagination. When we propositionally imagine, we imagine that a state of affairs obtains such as “imagining-that velociraptors invade the university library.” In so doing, the content of our imagining, or the representation used in our imagining, is understood to be a proposition rather than an image. ... It is often, but not always conceptually juxtaposed with Sensory or Objectual imagination (Kind, 2016; Debus, 2016; Wiltsher 2012; et al). Unlike propositional imagination, sensory imagination takes imagery as its content; images, not propositions represent what we are imagining, and therefore “fix” the content of our imaginative thought. ... What I’m about to put pressure on is the idea that sensory imagination is non-propositional – or at least that mental images, specifically visual mental images, do not represent propositionally. I think that they do. In fact, I think that visual mental images are loaded with propositional content, and if the content of a sensorily imagined thought is a visual mental image, it follows naturally that sensory imagination is more propositionally contentful than initially thought – in some cases, even more so than so-called propositional imagination.
Read MoreA post by Felipe De Brigard.
For the past few years, my lab has been doing research on what we call episodic counterfactual thinking (eCFT): our psychological capacity to imagine alternative ways in which past personal events could have occurred. For instance, when I recall choosing the wrong answer in a multiple-choice exam and, upon retrieval, imagine instead picking the right one, I am exercising eCFT. In this entry I would like to draw attention to a recent theoretical piece, published in collaboration with Dr. Natasha Parikh, in which we tried to characterize eCFT by contrast to related mental simulations varying along three dimensions: temporal context, degree of episodic detail, and modal profile. In that piece, we argue that extant empirical evidence strongly suggests that, while related along these three dimensions, eCFT may be a psychological process different from episodic memory (eM), episodic future (eFT), and semantic counterfactual thinking (sCF). This entry is an abridged version of our piece, which can be found here.
Read MoreAs 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 Bence Nanay with a list on Five things we couldn’t imagine a decade ago.
Read MoreAs 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 MoreAs 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 MoreAs 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 MoreAs 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 More(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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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 More