This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Jim Davies’ recent book: Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power (Pegasus Books 2019). See here for an introduction from Jim. Commentaries and replies will appear on Wednesday and Thursday.
Given that I work on memory and that my work has been inspired by psychological research on mental time travel, my attention, as I read Jim Davies’ stimulating book, was naturally drawn to chapter 2, on perception and memory, and chapter 3, on imagining the future.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Jim Davies’ recent book: Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power (Pegasus Books 2019). Today we begin with an introduction from Jim. Commentaries and replies will appear on Wednesday and Thursday.
You Can Improve Your Imagination. But Probably Not Your Imagery.
It’s easy to think of visual imagination as being nothing more than mental imagery, but we have what we might call “conceptual imagination” as well, that doesn’t really have much to do with the senses. Imagine a triangle. Now add one side to make a square. Now add so many sides that there are 2001 of them. The picture of it in your mind’s eye would (or should) look just like a circle, because the details are too fine to make out with the resolution of your mental imagery (Dennett 2013, 290). So how is imagining a 2001-side polygon different from imagining a circle? Because you know that it’s a polygon, not a circle. Now change the polygon so that it has one fewer sides (2000 sides). It doesn’t look any different in the image! Both a 2000-sided polygon and a 2001-sided polygon will look just like circles in your mental imagery. The difference is only in your belief about the polygon. These beliefs are part of your imagination, too, even if they don’t particularly look like anything. This is one example of how you can have a non-sensory imagining.
Read MoreA post by Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa.
In his Address to the Congress of Angostura, on February 15th, 1819, Simón Bolívar sketches his vision of the future for ‘Gran Colombia’, the state he wanted to help build after fighting for South American independence against Spain.
“Flying from age to age, my imagination reflects on the centuries to come … I feel a kind of rapture, as if this land stood at the heart of the universe [...] I see her as unifier, center, emporium for the human family” (The Angostura Address).
This passage closes a long speech where Bolívar is making concrete (though not infallible) projections and normative judgments about the political future, including denouncing slavery, defending democratic ideals, and rejecting the viability of a federalist system. I suggest that this speech is an example of the use of political and social imagination, that is, imagination that has as its object political or social change, consideration of the thoughts and feelings at the personal, group, and institutional level. I will argue that we need a concept of political imagination.
Read MoreA 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 More