Justifying Imaginings

A post by Jonathan Gilmore.

“We . . . become . . . aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs.”

—Pauline Kael, review of The Sound of Music

Among the tv shows I’ve binged on while locked down during the pandemic is Mrs. America, a fictionalized portrayal of Phillis Schlafly, an American conservative whose claim to fame (that is, infamy) was her staunch and ultimately successful role in organizing opposition to the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Played by Cate Blanchett, the television Schlafly is a fount of regressive politics and bigotry, yet for stretches of the series, garners a politically liberal viewer’s uncomfortable allegiance, even while pursuing her decidedly reactionary aims. Some reasons for aligning with her would justify a sympathetic attitude to her counterpart in real life—she’s condescended to by virtue of her gender, she’s clever and creative—but other reasons could count only within the context of an audience’s engagement with the quasi-fictional drama. Blanchett’s beauty as an actor is “imported” into the story as the beauty of the character she plays, and some of our rooting for her likely stems from a positive bias toward people occasioned by their physical attractiveness. (Dion, Berscheid, and Walster, 1972). Also, we initially see things through her eyes, inviting the natural affiliation we are disposed to form with those whose mental perspectives we simulate—a tendency that can generate identification on even arbitrary grounds (Kaufman and Libby, 2012; Goldstein and Cialdini, 2007).

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Rationalization is Imaginative

A post by Jason D’Cruz.

My own cheating just levels the playing field a bit. Most people cheat even more.

I simply couldn’t meet the deadline. It’s so hard being a perfectionist.

I just had to fudge those charitable donations because last year I overpaid my income taxes.

Spurious and self-justifying rationalization is such a commonplace that it is easy to miss just how finely wrought it can be. In recent years, both philosophers and psychologists have paid closer attention. (Fiery Cushman’s new target article – “Rationalization is Rational” –   in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, together with 26 commentaries, is sure to ignite more research).

Rationalization is a remarkable cognitive achievement. It consists of the mental processes of crafting and rehearsing a narrative that has the credible appearance of genuine reasoning, but whose narrative arc inevitably bends toward exculpation or self-justification. The causal effect of rationalization is typically to mitigate negative feelings of guilt or shame and clear away hurdles of conscience. In contrast to truth-directed inquiry, rationalization is an inherently creative undertaking.

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If sensory imagining is not a double content, what is it?

A post by Steve Humbert-Droz.

We know, since Descartes (1641), that exercises of sensory imagining (S-imagining) are not purely imagistic: they possess multiple aspects. This much is agreed upon among philosophers but, when the question of the intentionality of S-imaginings arises, agreement seems to unravel.

According to the Two Content View (TCV), S-imagining “has two kinds of content, qualitative content and assigned content” (Kung, 2010:632) – e.g., my image of an apple is about both (i) shapes and colors and (ii) about the fact that it is an apple, rather than a perfect imitation thereof. Advocates of TCV claim that the imagistic content does represent something, but it is not enough to individuate the imagining of an A rather than a B (Kung, 2010; Langland-Hassan, 2015; Martin, 2002; Noordhof, 2002; Peacocke, 1985; Tooming, 2018; White, 1990).

Some, however, have expressed skepticism about TCV. As Sartre claims, “despite some prejudices […] when I produce in myself the image of Pierre, it is Pierre who is the object of my current consciousness.” (1940/2010:4) The intentional object of our S-imaginings is exhausted by a single content treated in a specific way (Currie & Ravenscroft, 2002; Goldman, 2006; Hutto, 2015; Mulligan, 1999; Soteriou, 2013; Stock, n.d.; Wiltsher, 2016,2019).

In the following, (1) I sketch one of the most efficient pleas for the TCV by Peter Langland-Hassan, (2) I give two reasons to doubt the decisiveness of his arguments, and (3) suggest that S-imagining can be captured by the attitude/content distinction.

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Imagination and Hypothesis Generation

A post by Joshua Myers.

Peter Medawar, in his “Advice to a Young Scientist,” writes that

every discovery, every enlargement of the understanding, begins as an imaginative preconception of what the truth might be. The imaginative preconception—a “hypothesis”—arises by a process as easy or as difficult to understand as any other creative act of mind; it is a brainwave, an inspired guess, a product of a blaze of insight. (Medawar 1979, p. 84)

Medawar gets things exactly right. The imagination plays a crucial role in hypothesis generation: to form a hypothesis is to imagine a way the world could be. Despite being highly intuitive, and despite many scientists, like Medawar, explicitly stating that they use their imagination to come up with hypotheses, this view has received surprisingly little philosophical attention.

In this blog, I’ll motivate the imaginative account of hypothesis generation, explicate some of the mechanisms by which the imagination plays this epistemic role, and briefly speculate about norms on hypothesis generation.

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THE IMAGINATION ARGUMENT AGAINST PHYSICALISM

A post by Tufan Kıymaz.

Mary is a super-scientist who knows all facts about human visual experience that are expressible in physical/functional terms; however, she has never seen colors since she lives in a black-and-white room. If physicalism is true, then her physical/functional knowledge is complete knowledge about human visual experience. One day, she leaves the room, sees a red tomato and exclaims “So, this is what it is like to see red!” She learned a new fact, which means that her physical/functional knowledge was not complete knowledge, and therefore physicalism is false. This is Frank Jackson’s (1982, 1986) knowledge argument against physicalism.

Some philosophers, such as Churchland (1985:25), Maloney (1985:36), and Dennett (2007), interpret this argument to be about Mary’s inability to imagine red while she was in the room. However, Jackson writes:

the knowledge argument claims that Mary would not know what the relevant experience is like. What she could imagine is another matter. (Jackson 1986: 295, also see 292)

… So, the interpretation of his argument by the objectors, which states that Mary’s inability to imagine what it is like to see red implies that physicalism is false, is a strawman. Let’s call this strawman “the imagination argument.” As far as I can see in the literature, the imagination argument is criticized and rejected but I have never seen an explicit defense of this argument. In my paper “What Gary Couldn’t Imagine” (2019), I presented the most powerful version of the imagination argument that I can think of and evaluated its strengths and weaknesses. I believe that the imagination argument deserves more attention than it has received so far.

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Marching, boxing, pretending

A post by Greg Currie.

When their nests are threatened, plovers and lapwings behave in ways suggesting wing damage and consequent inability to fly, thereby distracting predators from the nest. People, experts even, describe this as “pretending that the bird has a broken wing that hinders flight”. Anscombe objected: “you cannot ascribe real pretence to anything unless you can ascribe to it (a) a purpose and (b) the idea ‘can be got by seeming to--‘”. Broken wing displays fail (b); the most one could say is that the bird has the idea that the predator can be distracted by having one wing drag on the ground.

Anscombe contrasts this purposive pretence with unpurposive pretending, when we pretend “just for fun” or “to tease”. Unpurposive pretending requires neither (a) nor (b), so is not ruled out as a description of distraction behaviour. Perhaps Anscombe assumes that non-humans don’t pretend for fun. She also distinguishes plain and non-plain pretending. The plain pretender “unreflectively knows that he is pretending” (292). A “great deal of unpurposive or only very vaguely and diffusely purposive pretending is non-plain“.

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Is philosophy of imagination socially isolated?

A post by Nick Wiltsher.

I had a great plan for this blog-post. See, I was meant to speak at a disaster studies conference last week. Disaster studies, it turns out, is a firmly established field, combining hard-headed analysis of actual disasters and their mitigation with speculative fictionalizing about possible disasters and dystopias. They wanted a philosopher to come talk about imagination, disasters of the future, and the future of disasters; I was local, cheap, and available. I was going to gather and share with you all some observations of how imagination figures in the thinking of disaster studiers, and make some comparisons with how we here think of imagination. “Field notes from the interdisciplinary wilds”. Something like that. Writes itself, practically.

Unfortunately, the disaster studies conference was cancelled. You can write your own punchline. And so there I was, devoid of field notes, socially isolated, inspirationally bereft, and yet dedicated to the provision of imagination content. Take all that as an apology for the state of what follows.

…So here’s an observation: based on a tiny, unrepresentative sample, I can confidently say that the way in which imagination is thought of in a range of broadly humanistic disciplines is pretty different from the way imagination is thought of in philosophy—both in terms of what imagination does, and what imagination is. Following the observation, here’s a question: what might explain this difference? I now present a range of cursory attempts at an answer.

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Imagined Smells

A post by Benjamin D. Young.

Imagine the smell of freshly baked cookies. Can you smell them right now? Unsurprisingly this is rather difficult but not impossible for some of us. Our ability to imagine smells is similar in many respects to our capacity for perceiving smells in general. It is affected by our attention to them and their importance within our daily lives. Over the years, I have used the unique features of olfaction to question general issues such as the anatomical realization of consciousness (Young, 2012), the difference between phenomenal consciousness and awareness (Young, 2014), as well as the representational format or formats of cognitive architectures (Young, 2015, 2019a). Smell is special and that carries over in cases where we lack direct sensory stimulation. Olfactory imagery, I have argued (Young, 2019b), is best conceived of as a form of mental imagery that inherits many of its properties from olfactory perception. What follows is a general overview of what we know about our imagined experiences of smells and how this suggests further directions of research exploring the boundaries of mental imagery.

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Aphantasia and the Cognitive Architecture of Imagination

A post by Michael Omoge.

Recently, imagination has been getting increased philosophical attention on account of its relevance in explaining a host of things, such as mindreading, creativity, autism, pretense, modal epistemology, and so on, and central to this attention, is the cognitive architecture of imagination. The thought is that understanding the cognitive architecture of imagination will illuminate the range of functions that have been attributed to imagination. Hence, Schellenberg notes, “gaining a better understanding of the cognitive architecture of imagination is of interest not just to philosophy of mind, but also to aesthetics and to modal epistemology” (2013: 498). Experts mostly agree, but with exceptions, that imagination has its own dedicated system, which constitutes this architecture. That is, according some experts, imagination has an internal structure, such that experiential and propositional imagination can be explained in terms of perceptual and language systems sending input into this internal structure, respectively. According to others, imagination doesn’t have any internal structure, in that experiential and propositional imagination come for free with our perceptual and linguistic capabilities, respectively.

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Book Symposium: Stuart Commentary and Response

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. See here for a commentary from Kourken Michaelian along with a reply from Jim. Today is a commentary from Mike Stuart along with a reply from Jim.

I’m very happy to be taking part in this symposium on Jim Davies’s book, Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power. The book is aimed at scientists but could be read by almost anyone. It summarizes and interprets results of scientific studies that are relevant to imagination, as well as related topics including perception, memory, foresight, emotion, morality, hallucination, (day-)dreaming, visualization, imaginary friends, AI, and scientific creativity.

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Book Symposium: Michaelian Commentary and Response

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.

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Book Symposium: Introduction from Jim Davies

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). 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.

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Is ‘political imagination’ a kind of imagination?

A 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.

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Infusing perception with imagination?

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:

  • I deliberately constructed them and can make them stop (Deliberate)

  • They don’t last long, unless I maintain focus (Fading)

  • They are phenomenally present in an elusive, almost invisible way (Phenomenally present as absent, Macpherson 2010)

In addition, it is reasonable to suppose that:

  • The imagined photos are caused by my thoughts about those photos (Cognitive source)

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)

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Imagination and implicit bias

A 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.

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A Picture Says a Thousand Propositions

A 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.

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Dimensions of counterfactual thought

A 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.

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Five Top Fives: Five things we couldn’t imagine a decade ago

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 Bence Nanay with a list on Five things we couldn’t imagine a decade ago.

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Five Top Fives: Aaron Meskin’s Top Five Imagination List (plus a bonus)

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).

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