The Junkyard is delighted to partner with the Northern Imagination Forum on their new video interview series: NIF Interviews. This video series features conversations with leading experts on the latest developments in the philosophy and cognitive science of imagination. In this first installment Robert Hopkins (New York University) discusses with Deb Marber his recent work on the sensory imagination and gives a juicy preview of his forthcoming book on the topic. This interview and future ones will be found on our new page.
Read MorePlato’s Imaginings
A post by Christine J. Thomas
What are you to do? You are drawn to the last piece of triple chocolate layer cake. Your mouth waters as you imagine savoring the sweet, creamy icing. The problem? You promised this piece to your daughter. And when you visualize confessing your indulgence to her, you feel a twinge of guilt. In the end, given the principled and emotionally intelligent person that you are, you opt to have fruit for dessert.
Plato’s dramatization of your soul’s inner goings-on would employ his regular actors: appetite, spirit, and reason. But he also appreciates a need for some lesser-known talents: a painter and the liver (see below). An expanded cast is Plato’s way of recognizing a complicated psychology in which imagination supports human cognition and action.
My hope with this post is to advertise some intriguing and rich moments in Plato’s psychology to those interested in imagination. I am also keen to promote Plato’s positive view that affect-laden imaginings are essential to practical success.
Read MoreEmpathy, sensibility, and the novelist’s imagination
A post by Olivia Bailey
My aim in this entry is to raise (or re-raise) a question about the limits of a particular imaginative activity that often travels under the name of empathy, and to voice one possible answer to that question.
Adam Smith tells us that the emotionally “live” imaginative activity at the center of his moral theory involves a kind of exchange of character: “But though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an imaginary change of situations with the person principally concerned, yet…[w]hen I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die: but I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters” (TMS, VII.iii.1.4). Following Smith, it is common, in the literature on what is now known as empathy rather than sympathy, to distinguish between two forms of imaginative engagement with others’ perspectives: 1) imagining being oneself in the other’s position 2) imagining being the other in the other’s position, where only the latter counts as true empathy. Oftentimes, imagining being the other in the other’s position is understood to involve the imagined adoption of not just the other’s history and/or material characteristics, but also their sensibility. By “sensibility,” I mean a characteristic pattern of feeling and concern, centrally including tendencies to apprehend things in a particular evaluative light. Different people, the thought goes, have different sensibilities (he is timorous, she is bold, they are hot-headed and apt to see insult everywhere). And if we want to get a real grip on another’s experience, such that we can accurately appreciate and assess their perceptions, their choices, their actions, we need to empathize in this latter sense: we need to imaginatively view the other’s circumstances as if through the filter of their sensibility.
Read MoreQuestions and Confusions Regarding Ambiguous (Non)Fictionality
A post by Nele Van de Mosselaer
My grandfather likes telling jokes and funny stories. He is also exceptionally proficient at incorporating these seamlessly in already occurring conversations. Moreover, he has the habit of vividly narrating them in the first person, so that they take the shape of long-winded, autobiographical narratives. These narratives tend to fall into one of two categories. They are either descriptions of funny situations he actually encountered sometime in his 89 years of life experience, or shameless adaptations of the joke he discovered on that day’s calendar page. For this blogpost, I want to investigate a particular effect that these stories have on me: very often, and for long periods of time, I am unable to figure out whether my grandfather is telling a fictional or a non-fictional story. And many times, I have found myself laughing at the story before tentatively asking whether the situation I just laughed at actually happened or not, to the great amusement of my grandfather.
Read MoreThat's About Right: In Memoriam Adam Morton
A post by Hande Tuna and Octavian Ion
We lost Adam Morton on October 22, 2020. Adam was a doctoral advisor to one of us and professor and friend of both. He taught at various institutes including Ottawa, Bristol, Princeton, Michigan, Oklahoma, Alberta, and British Columbia. Our paths crossed in Alberta where we both did our PhDs.
Read MoreJunk Fiction and the Junkyard of the Imagination
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 MoreWhy do philosophers love thought experiments so much?
A 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 MoreWho’s got Aphantasia? Switching the Focus from Visual Imagery
A 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 MoreCollective Imagination, Thought Communities, and Politics
A 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 MoreKnowledge via the Imagination: Routes and Roadblocks
A 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 MoreSome Recent Work on Imagination January 2021
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.)
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Image via Pixabay
Winter Hiatus
The 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 MoreHidden Elements of Imagining
A 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 MoreThe Symbolic Link Between Bio Tech & Neuro Tech: An Imaginative Melding of Biological & Existential Homeostasis
A 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 MoreComing up with a story: waiting, imagining and obsessing
A 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 MoreFeeling and Time
A 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 Puzzle About Pretending
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 MoreElection Imaginings: Imagining the World We Would Be Waking Up to Today
As 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 MoreMental Imagery and the Epistemology of Testimony
A 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 MoreEconomics of Imagination: Showing and Telling with Pictures and Words
A 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.
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