A post by Neil Van Leeuwen
I'd like to use this blog as an opportunity to raise a puzzle about pretense and imagination.
Many theorists of imagination, including several participants on this blog, have tended to think that pretending requires imagining. When I pretend, say, that I am Napoleon, what distinguishes this from being deluded that I am Napoleon, is that I imagine rather than believe that I am Napoleon. And this enables us to distinguish pretense from delusion or confusion, even if many of the outward behavioral expressions are the same in either case.
Yet here is a counterexample to the general thesis that pretending requires imagining. Or at least I think it's a counterexample.
Read MoreAs denizens of The Junkyard know, we normally post new content on Wednesdays. A few weeks ago, when I realized that this meant that we would be due to post new content on the morning after election day (should that have caps? In my head, it seems like it should say: The Morning After), I knew it couldn’t be business as usual. And so here’s what we decided to do. I wrote to some friends of the blog, scholars of imagination all, and asked them to engage in some imaginings themselves. The simple instruction: Imagine the world we’ll wake up to on November 4. Other than asking them to focus on the world we will wake up to, and not on the world we hope we will wake up to, I gave them free rein. And I gave them a deadline of today, October 29.
Here’s what they came up with.
Read MoreA post by Daniel Munro
During testimonial knowledge transmission between subjects, a testifier who knows something verbally conveys it to a listener, who comes to know that same thing by trusting what the testifier has said. Things go epistemically awry when a listener trusts a testifier who intentionally or unintentionally says something false, in which case the listener forms a testimonial belief that doesn’t amount to knowledge.
One question we can ask about the epistemology of testimony concerns the basis of testimonial knowledge: when knowledge is transmitted from testifier to listener, what is the evidential or justifying basis of the knowledge the listener acquires?
Read MoreA post by Elisabeth Camp
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” or so the saying goes. But which words, and to what end? ... Here, I want to focus on how three differences between imagistic and linguistic systems – in content, perspective, and force – conspire to shape the economics of imagination: in who pays, in what coin, for what result. There is no global currency of ‘worth’, but there are systematic tradeoffs to be navigated, by both maker and audience.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Peter Langland-Hassan’s recent book Explaining Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2020). The book is available as an Open Access download. See here for an introduction from Peter. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
In this thoughtful, carefully argued book, Peter Langland-Hassan defends a reductive account of imagining in the attitudinal (as opposed to imagistic) sense. By contrast with the standard view that imagining is a sui generis propositional attitude on a par with, but distinct from, other propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires, or intentions, Peter maintains that imaginings can be explained in more basic folk-psychological terms: that is, reduced to these other attitudes. Peter’s systematic and thorough arguments renders the view surprisingly plausible.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Peter Langland-Hassan’s recent book Explaining Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2020). The book is available as an Open Access download. See here for an introduction from Peter. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
We often evaluate conditionals, or statements of the form, ‘If p, q’, in the imagination. Roughly, we perform a ‘thought experiment’ by imagining a scenario in which the antecedent p holds and then considering whether the consequent q holds in it, too. When someone ends up believing the conditional on the basis of such a thought experiment, one imagines both the antecedent and the consequent of the conditional. The attitudes towards the antecedent and the consequent (not to mention the attitudes towards many other propositions used to ‘fill in’ the details of the imagined scenario) constitute sui generis imaginings.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Peter Langland-Hassan’s recent book Explaining Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2020). The book is available as an Open Access download. See here for an introduction from Peter. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
One way in which a philosophy book can be brilliant is by presenting claims, positions, and arguments with which you agree entirely, and yet deriving from them a view with which you feel you somehow disagree. By this criterion (and by many others), Peter Langland-Hassan’s book is brilliant. The pleasure and the puzzle lie in trying to work out just what it is that’s bugging you. I’m not sure that I’ve cracked the puzzle yet, so I’m going to indulge in some thinking out loud, and invite Langland-Hassan to help me straighten it out.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Peter Langland-Hassan’s recent book Explaining Imagination. Today we begin with an introduction from Peter. Commentaries and replies to follow Tuesday through Thursday.
If you can’t make one, you don’t know how it works.
So said Fred Dretske in “A recipe for thought,” and so I’m inclined to believe. He offered the slogan both as “something like an engineer’s ideal, a designer’s vision, of what it takes to understand how something works,” and as an axiom at the heart of philosophical naturalism—one that applies as much to the mind as to anything else (Dretske, 2002).
Knowing how to make something, in Dretske’s sense, entails knowing how to write a recipe for it. Such a recipe can’t include, as an ingredient, the very thing it is a recipe for. “One cannot have a recipe for a cake that lists a cake, not even a small cake, as an ingredient,” Dretske explains. “Recipes of this sort will not help one understand what a cake is.” Likewise for intelligence: “if you want to know what intelligence is, you need a recipe for creating it out of parts you already understand” (Dretske, 2002).
The same points apply to imagination. We won’t understand what imagination is—won’t be able to explain imagination—until we can write a recipe for making it out of parts we already understand. My book, Explaining Imagination, is a compendium of such recipes.
Read MoreA post by Dorothea Debus
Sometimes, people imagine their own future selves. For example, you might imagine going on a bike ride with your friends this coming week-end; you might imagine celebrating the completion of a long-term project (getting a degree, or writing a book) in a couple of years' time; or you might imagine looking after your grandchildren in ten years, or thirty. In each of these cases, you imagine yourself, in the future, being in a certain situation, having certain experiences, doing certain things.
Read MoreA post by Eileen John
The term ‘moral imagination’ commonly refers, in my usage, to something nebulous: activity that goes beyond argument and direct experience, somehow concerns the moral dimension of life, and is somehow a good thing. My philosophical work often deals with morally interesting literary texts, and ‘moral imagination’ can be handy for gesturing at what readers do when engaging with morally charged fictional or figurative content. But is immersing oneself in such content in itself a moral activity? If I construe moral imagination, albeit hazily, as a morally good thing, the activity ought to be more demanding of a reader’s moral resources. Maybe it counts as moral imagining if imaginative activity leads readers to exercise moral judgment or to generate moral understanding in response to the work. I remember realizing, in the middle of reading a short story, that I had behaved terribly to someone exactly as the self-absorbed central character in the story had – would re-understanding myself in light of moral understanding of a character count as moral imagination? That seems a bit accidental (depending on readers happening to have an autobiographical realization) and still not especially deep in terms of demands on moral resources. Maybe these are slightly good outcomes, and the morally imaginative potential of literature is slightly good. I will approach this issue, of how there could be morally demanding potential in what readers do, first by raising a few general questions about moral imagination.
Read MoreA post by Christopher Badura
According to Aaron Smuts prescriptions to imagine are rare:
we might ask if we are ever morally required to imagine something or another. Some might think that we are occasionally morally required to imagine ourselves in another’s shoes, so to speak. But this kind of prescription is unusual. Prohibitions on imagining are far more familiar, though still rare. (Smuts, 2016, p. 381)
I’ll discuss an example, suggesting that obligations to believe entail obligations to imagine. Since similar cases occur frequently, prescriptions to imagine are quite common – counting tokens.
Read MoreA post by Magdalena Balcerak Jackson
Many of our everyday decisions – small and big – involve thinking about what it would be like to live a certain future in order to figure out whether this is indeed a future one would want to live:
It’s a hot humid afternoon in Miami. An ice cream sounds like it will hit the spot. You open the doors to the Azucar Ice cream company on Calle Ocho. Sure, you could just get a scoop of chocolate, but now that you are here, your eyes are drawn to the board with the signature flavors: Would you enjoy olive oil, orange zest and dark chocolate? Or maybe sweet potato, ancho chile and chocolate chip? And how about banana and red hots?
You can’t actually taste the ice cream. So, you would likely answer the question of which ice cream you would like best by imagining how each ice cream tastes. If your gustatory imagination is good enough, this imagining will be an essential part of making a rational choice, that is, a choice that best satisfies your preferences. This is so because absent the possibility of actually experiencing the taste, imagination is the only capacity we have to obtain information that is essentially experiential, information about how things look, sound, taste or feel.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Greg Currie’s recent book: Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. See here for an introduction from Greg. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.
* * *
Commentary from Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann.
In many respects, some of the main philosophical achievements of the intricate and important work done in Imagining and Knowing lie in what it does not set out to do. It does not for example seek to define the notion of fiction, nor to provide conclusive evidence for the alleged relation between fiction and the development of empathic skills. It does not present a decisive case against the claim which constitutes its central target, namely that fiction can yield knowledge or understanding (hereafter Cognitivism), nor does it settle for it. What it does do however, is to carve out a distinct set of pressing concerns by developing this one striking point: if we grant that the imagination is central to our experience of fiction – as we ought to – then the numerous (hypothetical) connections which supporters of Cognitivism have relied on between works of fiction on the one hand and learning, truth and knowledge on the other can only be described as shaky. At best. Where, we are repeatedly asked, is the empirical evidence for positing these connections?
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Greg Currie’s recent book: Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. See here for an introduction from Greg. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.
Commentary from Manuel García-Carpintero
Greg Currie’s Imagining and Knowing makes a compelling case for a mild skepticism about learning from fiction. Far from rejecting that fictions offer knowledge (which adds to their artistic merit), the book offers a partial defense. It argues that better support is needed than personal impressions, highlighting the significance of empirical research. The book is packed with original ideas and sharp arguments; I enjoyed every page.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Greg Currie’s recent book: Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. See here for an introduction from Greg. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.
* * *
Commentary from Paloma Atencia-Linares.
Greg Currie’s recent book Imagining and Knowing, is an engaging (and imaginative) non-fiction book from which we learn—or which seriously persuades us—that we should be cautious of overestimating the power of fiction to convey knowledge. This is not to say that Currie repudiates the value of fiction as a source of knowledge. On the contrary, because he takes it very seriously, he invites us to be more thorough when endorsing certain views.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Greg Currie’s recent book: Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. Today we begin with an introduction from Greg. Commentaries and replies will appear Tuesday through Thursday.
Common opinion connects fiction and the mind in two ways: via our capacity to imagine, and via our capacity to know things. Imagining and Knowing argues that the value of the imagination for explaining what fiction is and how it works is sometimes underestimated, and that the capacity of fiction to provide learning is often exaggerated.
Read MoreA post by Alma Barner
We sometimes rely on imagination when making decisions about what to do. I wonder what I should do, later this afternoon. I imagine going swimming in the nearby pool. Or, if it doesn’t rain, I could go to the park to play badminton.
In decision-making, imagination can help us bring salient alternatives to act to mind. It can help us decide which options are realistic, which actions feasible. Imagining what I could do can help me get clear on what my preferences are; it might even bring to the surface preferences I had forgotten I have. It is well-established that imagination plays an important role in future-oriented planning.
It is also well-established that purely self-interested decision-making is not our only or even typical way of going about. Humans are social. We don’t usually spend our weekends all by ourselves, but with families and friends. After all, I need somebody else to play badminton with. And it might be fun to go swimming together.
Planning a family holiday or a Saturday afternoon activity that we all are happy with involves joint decision making. You might prefer to play badminton indoors instead of going to the park. So we need to coordinate our individual preferences. In such cases, humans display a systematic bias towards cooperative behaviour. We decide together on the basis of which option is best for the group, not for us individually.
Contrast individual decision-making with joint, cooperative, decision-making. If we at times rely on imagination when deciding what to do, we might plausibly also rely on imagination when deciding what to do together. Which role does imagination play here? If it plays any role at all, does it differ from the one it plays in individual decision-making? To be clear, this post is not primarily about psychology. It is rather for those who are into formal theories of decision-making, as well as imagination.
There are different decision-theoretic approaches to explaining rational cooperative decision-making in humans. In this post I focus on what I consider to be a plausible candidate: the theory of team reasoning. As we will see, it allows for imagination to play a special role in joint-decision making.
Read MoreA post by María Jimena Clavel Vázquez
Imagination has been a common topic in coronavirus-related reads, both in the form of invitations to mobilize our imaginative powers and complaints about our lack thereof. This shouldn’t be surprising. Imagination is often summoned when confronted with social and political challenges. We are invited to join efforts to envision possible solutions to the problems faced by society, in general, or by a specific group of citizens. These exercises are considered an important aspect of political projects and one first step towards political change. For instance, in his 2009 Inaugural Address, former US president Barack Obama reminded his adversaries of: “what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose” (Phillips 2009).
There are two ways to make sense of this call. We might think that we are summoned as individuals to put our imaginative capacity to good use and to think about our future. Although what is at stake here is collective, the exercise is, ultimately, individual. Or, we might think that we are invited, instead, to participate in a collective exercise of imagination. We are asked to put our heads together to come up with a solution or build a project. It’s not only relevant that we think about our future but that we do so together. Collective imagination is a good candidate to make sense of at least some cases of political imagination.
Read MoreA post by Uku Tooming
The following lines are from John Cale’s song “Paris 1919”:
Efficiency efficiency they say
Get to know the date and tell the time of day
As the crowds begin complaining
How the Beaujolais is raining
Down on the darkened meetings of Champs Élysées
The album with the same title, described by Cale as “an example of the nicest ways of saying something ugly” is full of wonderfully impressionistic imagery, centered on the theme of Europe around World War I. One (presumably unintended) effect that this album has on me is a rather intense pleasure when thinking of the last two lines in the excerpt. The imagery of experiencing Beaujolais (which I rarely drink) falling down on me on the streets of Paris (where I have never been) is surprisingly enjoyable.
However, when I start to think more closely about the imagined situation, then a complication arises. I quickly come to realize that if I actually were to experience wine raining on me, the overall experience would not be that wonderful, given that my clothes would get soaked in wine, which is far from pleasant. By trying to imagine the scenario more accurately, I come to enjoy it far less. Only by avoiding this, I can reap the maximal hedonic reward. This might be an idiosyncratic response on my part, but I am sure that many people delight in some imagery that upon further scrutiny wouldn’t be so pleasing.
Read MoreA post by Avshalom M. Schwartz
Although the imagination is often seen as the most neglected mental faculty in the history of Western political thought (Ezrahi, 2012, 7; Bottici and Challand 2011, 4), pre-modern scientists and philosophers took the imagination to be a significant mental faculty. From antiquity, through the middle ages and Renaissance and up until early modernity, political philosophers viewed the imagination as not only central to sense perception and knowledge, but also as presenting a significant threat to political order and stability. This is perhaps most clearly evident in the works of Plato and Hobbes. In this post, I will explore their accounts of the imagination as a mental faculty and point to their similar fear of the corrupting role the imagination can play in destabilizing a political regime, especially a regime whose authority and legitimacy are grounded in reason. As I will argue, since both thinkers attempted to solve the endemic problem of disorder by grounding absolute political authority in reason, they both viewed imagination’s susceptibility to deception and corruption by irrational sources as representing a significant threat.
Read More