A post by Michel-Antoine Xhignesse
I really like reading historical fiction. I mean, I really really like it. I don’t mean Honoré de Balzac, Robert Graves, or Georgette Heyer, though. I’m talking about the kind that comes in a series of a dozen or more installments, which features vikings (or Romans!), and is structured around some big, historical set-piece battle—the bloodier, the better! Once you’ve read a few dozen of these, you start to suspect they might be written to a template.
These are paradigmatic examples of what Thomas J. Roberts (1993) called ‘junk fiction’, but which a kinder reader might prefer to call ‘genre’ or ‘pulp’ fiction. These are novels which aspire to be page-turners and which belong to well-established genres, but whose plots are somewhat… formulaic. Think airport novels and drugstore Harlequins; Agatha Christie and Anne Rice; Danielle Steel, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King. Even children read a lot of them—remember Goosebumps, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys?
In film and TV, these are the soaps, romcoms, slashers, and zombie films; Rosemary & Thyme, Stargate, and Star Trek. This isn’t to say that junk fiction is of generally low aesthetic merit; Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronichles, for example, are a remarkable piece of work, as is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002). It’s just that when we pick these up, we have a pretty good idea of what we’re in for.
Read MoreA post by Ethan Landes
Philosophers love thought experiments, and imagining non-actual events or dilemmas is as core to philosophy as any other method philosophers have. Ask a philosopher to list philosophy’s most influential arguments, and the list might include Plato’s cave, Gettier’s 1963 refutation of JTB, Foot and Thomsons’s Trolley cases, and Cartesian skepticism. All of these are either thought experiments or include thought experiments playing essential roles in the arguments.
If you ask a thought-experiment-loving philosopher (and I count myself among them) why they use thought experiments, you are apt to get an answer like “it lets us control for variables that would be impossible to control for in real life”. When pushed on this, typical ways of unpacking this idea appeal to the epistemology of thought experiments. For example, metaphilosophers have defended the use of imaginary cases instead of facts by arguing that philosophers are interested in knowing things about possibility and necessity rather than actuality (Bealer 1998; Ludwig 2007). In a similarly epistemic vein, I’ve both witnessed others and caught myself telling undergraduates that philosophers use thought experiments because real-life cases are not “clean” enough.
Read MoreA post by Andrea Blomkvist
Philosophers always ask their readers to imagine things, and this piece will prove no exception: imagine the seaside. You probably imagined something like seeing the waves rolling in. But my bet is that you also imagined some of the following:
Hearing the seagulls overhead
·The smell and taste of salt in the air
The feeling of sand on your feet
If you imagined any of these, you used different kinds of mental imagery corresponding to the different sensory systems. Imagining hearing the sound of seagulls uses auditory imagery; imagining tasting the salt in the air uses gustatory imagery, and so on. Though we do sometimes imagine using only one kind of imagery, they often come together as multisensory imagery (Nanay, 2018). But despite this interconnectedness, one kind of imagery has predominantly captured the attention of researchers: visual imagery. In this blog post, I will argue this has wrongly skewed the study of the mind, and I use aphantasia as a case study to bring this point out.
Read MoreA post by Todd Nicholas Fuist
"I was a troubled kid when I was younger," Robert mused, looking out the window of the car at a group of homeless youth we had just been speaking to, milling around on the sidewalk. "There but for the grace of God could have gone I.”
I was getting a ride back to my apartment with members of Welcome and Shalom Synagogue (WSS), the progressive, LGBTQ-identified congregation I had been studying, after we had volunteered with a mobile soup kitchen that served late-night food on street corners. The members of WSS were explaining to me, as we packed up and got into the car, why they consistently volunteered with this particular soup kitchen, on this particular street. "We are serving our community," one congregant explained. The area we were in was widely understood as a gay neighborhood. Our serving location was, in fact, right down the street from the headquarters of a notable LGBTQ nonprofit and just off of the main route of the city's Pride Parade. From consistently volunteering with the soup kitchen, the members of WSS got to know a number of the regulars and learned that many of the homeless youth who line up to get a meal are, in fact, LGBTQ. Earlier in the evening, the volunteer coordinator for the synagogue noted that she was especially happy to volunteer in this neighborhood because she figured conservative churches—which meant most churches in her estimation—were less likely to serve an LGBTQ community and, therefore, WSS was helping a population that was uniquely in need.
I tell this story from my ethnographic research on progressive religious communities to highlight the role of collective imagination in social life.
Read MoreA post by Arnon Levy and Ori Kinberg
Can we know facts about the concrete, physical world, solely by using our imagination? Recently, certain philosophers – among them the editor-in-chief of this blog (Kind 2016, 2018) – have forcefully argued for an affirmative answer. While some debates about knowledge-via-the-imagination concern regimented uses of the imagination pertaining to higher forms of knowledge (such as thought experiments in scientific and philosophical contexts), and others concern the benefits of unbridled exploration of fictional realms, these authors suggest that the imagination supplies us with something else: neither scientific-philosophical knowledge nor “knowledge of the deep, elusive sort that we may hope to gain from great works of fiction, but knowledge of far more mundane, widespread matters of immediate practical relevance” (Williamson 2016, 113).
We understand these arguments as aiming for a fairly strong claim: it is not merely that the imagination can be a vehicle for knowledge. Rather, it is argued that (under certain conditions, at least, of which more anon) the fact that a belief p was produced via the imagination constitutes a reason to accept p. We take it that this is what Amy Kind, for instance, has in mind when she says that “imaginative exercises have... justificatory power in their own right” or when she speaks of the “imagination qua imagination [playing] a justificatory role” (2018, 231). As far as we can see, there are two principal routes to this claim. We will suggest that both fall short.
Read MoreThere 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 More
