There has been a veritable explosion of scholarly work on imagination as of late! We can’t list it all, but below we list many of the papers and books on imagination that have been published since our previous roundup about a year ago.
(In our last update, we included some forthcoming work. We don’t repeat those entries here. Note also that because of the vast amount of recently published work we have decided not to include forthcoming work in this round-up – we list only work that has already been published, including online first publication.)
Read MoreThe Junkyard will be on hiatus for the winter break. We will return in mid-January with new weekly postings. First up will be a roundup on Recent Work on Imagination.
Read MoreA post by Alon Chasid
Imagining is a complicated mental activity. If we are asked to imagine, or find ourselves imagining, say, that the COVID-19 crisis is over, our imaginative episode will generally comprise more than just one single representational state with the content ‘the COVID-19 crisis is over.’ Rather, that representational state will likely be accompanied by sensory elements, additional imaginings, mental imagery, conative and emotional responses, and other mental states that are related, one way or another, to the fact that the crisis is over. Ordinarily, we seem to have access—perhaps even privileged access—to various elements of our imaginative activity. We have no trouble describing how our imaginings evolved, how we reacted emotionally or conatively to them, etc. There may be a problem with regard to tracking certain features of our stream of consciousness (Schwitzgebel 2011). But overall, tracking the main elements of our imaginative activity is quite straightforward.
Read MoreA post by John F. DeCarlo
Bachelard notes the history of science has been hampered by unconscious epistemological obstacles such as the division of body/mind, but that times of traumatic disruption have often been opportunities for insight and growth. Amidst our current global rupture, there is certainly an urgency for an enhanced understanding of our immune systems. Fortunately, Homo sapiens are poised on an evolutionary cusp, with ecological-cultural forces exerting pressures to strengthen our healing capabilities, and scientific and medical advancements enabling us to better understand and supplement our natural immune systems. But - how – to best to proceed?
Read MoreA post by Julia Langkau
I’m interested in the process of creating, or in how we come up with things.
Together with two musicians, I decided to produce an audio play, broadly on the topic of the pandemic. My part was to come up with the idea for the story, and to write it. In this post, I will talk about some aspects of the process of coming up with the story, and compare it to some aspects of the process of coming up with a philosophical idea. Here is the plot of the story.
Read MoreA post by Luke Roelofs
Imagining is often emotionally charged. And it often serves to represent emotions. In this post I’m interested in cases where it’s both: where an emotional state felt by the imaginer (what I’ll call the ‘imaginative emotion’) represents an emotion which the imaginer or someone else either will feel, did feel, is feeling, or would have felt (what I’ll call the ‘imagined emotion’).
For example, in trying to empathise with a friend’s difficult situation, I might imagine myself in their situation so as to simulate their feelings. In trying to predict someone’s decision, I might do the same with an eye to what actions the simulated emotion might lead to; and in trying to make a decision I might imagine myself experiencing the consequences of one choice or the other, and see how it makes me feel. These efforts at emotional imagining are fallible, especially in difficult circumstances, but they are nevertheless common, and often better than nothing (cf. some past posts here).
Read MoreA 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.
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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.
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