A post by Reza Hadisi
[Most of the ideas here are presented in Hadisi (2021)]
Practical knowledge
Practical knowledge is a peculiar concept. On the one hand, I find philosophical attempts to articulate it to be almost always incomprehensible. On the other hand, when I think about the relevant ordinary cases, I’m convinced that it demarcates a special form of knowledge that is distinct from theoretical knowledge. Let me explain.
First, Anscombe famously complains that “modern philosophers” (a broad brush?) have “blankly misunderstood” what “ancient and medieval philosophers” (speaking of broad brushes!) meant by practical knowledge (Anscombe 1958, sec. 32). But it’s notoriously difficult to get a grip on her positive proposal:
Practical knowledge is 'the cause of what it understands', unlike 'speculative' knowledge, which 'is derived from the object known'. (Anscombe 1958, sec. 48)
On this influential account then, practical knowledge is a way of knowing where the known fact is in somehow caused by the state of knowing that fact. But many have worried that this notion is “causally perverse” and “epistemically mysterious” (Velleman 2007, 103; c.f. Schwenkler 2015). I can know that there is ice-cream in the fridge only if that’s the case; but my knowledge of that fact does not miraculously bring about an ice-cream into the world. How can knowing p make it the case that p?
Now, I am among those who are convinced that Anscombe is on the right tracks here. And this is not (only) because of a nostalgia for medieval scholasticism. Although practical knowledge seems to resist philosophical clarification, I think it gestures towards an idea that is rather intuitive.
Read MoreA post by Deb Marber
As the weather warms up and I look at people sunbathing on their front porches, not risking a holiday abroad, I have been reminded of a short book by Pascal Ory: L’invention du bronzage, or The Invention of sun-tanning. In it, Ory explores the cultural ‘revolution’ that made sunbathing fashionable in France and other European countries. Despite the apparent triviality of this subject matter, Ory is by all standards a serious academic. In March of this year, he was elected to the Académie Française, arguably the most prestigious academic French institution; and he is an Emeritus Professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris who has spent much of his career writing about Fascism and other non-frivolous matters. Ory’s intellectual progression from dealing with the topic of fascism towards that of suntanning might surprise some; but it is less mysterious once both subjects are viewed through the lens of public relations: both involve the engineering of radical shifts in public opinion.
Read MoreA post by Steph Rennick
(A caveat, before we get underway: throughout, I’m going to mention folk intuitions. What precisely they are, and what role they ‘really’ play in philosophy, are matters of great contention on which I will happily remain neutral (but see Pust 2019 for more detail, if you’re interested). Here I have in mind the sort of thing that is the output of X-Phi or armchair musing on thought experiments, and that is at least ostensibly used as a starting point for conceptual analysis and to ensure all parties are talking about the same thing, and that is sometimes claimed as evidence in favour of a view. With that out of the way, let us begin!)
I like to read TV tropes. Partly because it’s a different way of spending time with the books, games and shows I enjoy, but also because I’m interested in patterns, and which ideas capture the popular imagination and gain enough traction to become tropey.
A trope, for the uninitiated, is a recurring motif or idea that can manifest across any media where stories are told (think knights in shining armour, squishy wizards, or Glaswegian-accented villains). There are also more overtly philosophical tropes: you can’t change the past, free will requires choice, the person goes with the mind rather than the body, and so on.
My interest in these fictional patterns extends to my working hours. One of the nice things about fiction, as many philosophers have pointed out, is that it presents us with richer and more varied vignettes to elicit folk intuitions than we might have dreamed up on our own (see for instance Cameron 2015, Ichikawa & Jarvis 2009). Our thought experiments are typically limited by our imaginations; we might transcend this limitation by outsourcing to other creative minds.
Read MoreA post by M. Jimena Clavel Vázquez and Adriana Clavel-Vázquez
In The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd notes that her eyes give her access to many worlds: to light, colour, shape, and shadow, to the patterned world of the snowflake and the petal, and to the rhythmic lines of the mountain. Her eyes, ultimately, give her access to beauty. What enables this access? Shepherd suggests that “[p]erhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion”, that “one has to look creatively to see this (…) as beauty” (Shepherd 2014, p. 101). For Shepherd, beauty is not only something we see, but something we see when we look creatively.
Here, we outline a defence of aesthetic perceptualism, the view that aesthetic properties feature in perceptual experience, on the basis of an anticipatory approach to perception.[1] Aesthetic perceptualism faces challenges from the get-go. Typically, it’s said that only low-level properties (like colour and shape for vision, or volume and pitch for sound) feature in the content of perceptual experience. Aesthetic properties are high-level and don’t belong to features paradigmatically associated with sense modalities.
Read MoreThe 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 second installment, Magdalena Balcerak Jackson (University of Miami) discusses with Deb Marber her latest work on the epistemic and social role of imagination. This interview and future ones will all be linked from our new page dedicated to the NIF Interview Series.
Read MoreA post by Mike Stuart
Imagining humanity’s future in space can be exhilarating. But it’s also big business. NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and the whole sci-fi industry shape and are shaped by what we imagine. Whether we grow up wanting to be astronauts, cosmonauts, taikonauts, spationauts, or some other kind of “naut” depends on what we imagine. Do we see such people as superheroes, cowboys, scientists, celebrities, or public funds poorly invested? In fields like science and technology studies, such collective imaginings related to on-going and future scientific and technological projects are referred to as “sociotechnical imaginaries.”
Focusing on the case of NASA, I want to think about these imaginaries and what they have to do with imagination. Specifically, three questions stand out: (1) What is imagined in a sociotechnical imaginary? (2) Who decides the imaginative content of an imaginary? And (3), can imaginaries be democratized?
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Maksymilian Del Mar’s recent book Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (Bloomsbury Publishing 2020). See here for an introduction from Maksymilian. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.
Del Mar develops a persuasive account of the positive value that what he calls ‘artefacts’ (metaphors, figures, scenarios, and fictions) can have in the process of legal adjudication. I want to explore the darker side of this story: the potential risks that using artefacts might pose. I will consider two ways in which the use of an artefact in adjudication might not contribute to “the making of insight into what values, vulnerabilities and interests might be at stake in a case and in cases potentially like it” (pg. 1). I will not suggest that these risks outweigh the benefits of using artefacts; the point of asking about potential risks is rather to make the process of inquiry as effective as possible. My focus will chiefly be on metaphors, because (as Del Mar shows) they can be very powerful artefacts. But at least some of what I say carries over to other cases.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Maksymilian Del Mar’s recent book Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (Bloomsbury Publishing 2020). See here for an introduction from Maksymilian. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.
Artefacts of Legal Inquiry is a remarkable accomplishment. It shows what intellectual curiosity, academic innovative thinking, and impeccable scholarship can achieve. In it, Maksymilian Del Mar brings together with great clarity a vast number of issues, offering an original perspective on inquiry in adjudication. The first part of the book is theoretical and highly interesting, but the second part is simply fascinating, as it grapples with specific legal cases and the ways in which the artefacts of fiction, metaphor, figure, and scenario were used in them. I will focus on one case which substantiates Maks’ claim that we need to think about ‘the dynamic relations’ between ‘forms of language and processes of imagination’ (437).
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Maksymilian Del Mar’s recent book Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (Bloomsbury Publishing 2020). See here for an introduction from Maksymilian. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.
* * *
Engaging with Artefacts of Legal Inquiry has been a formative training for my imaginative abilities. With remarkable care and rigour, Maks Del Mar brings readers into the realm of adjudication and invites them (especially in the second part of the book) to play with him by exploiting their imaginations. Instead of abstractly theorizing about the imagination, Del Mar aims at showing how it works in the specific case of adjudication. In so doing Del Mar outlines a theory of the imagination, but a dynamic one – as he might say (according to him, theorising is an activity with an undeniable contingent and variable character – see §C of the Introduction).
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Maksymilian Del Mar’s recent book Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (Bloomsbury Publishing 2020). Today we begin with an introduction from Maksymilian. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
Does imagination matter to legal reasoning? This is the question confronted in Artefacts of Legal Inquiry. Surprisingly, the question has not be asked, let alone answered, much before in legal scholarship. When it has been, it has often been approached through other categories, such as intuition or creativity, or as a moral virtue akin to empathy. What has not been examined is the importance of contemporary developments in the philosophy of imagination for theories of legal reasoning. It is this challenge that the book seeks to meet. It does so by also drawing on other fields that have a great deal to say about imagination: literary theory and history; and rhetorical theory and history. The book is thus an interdisciplinary investigation into the value of imagination for legal reasoning.
Read MoreA post by Jennifer Fraser
It’s been just over a year since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, and I don’t think I’ve ever done more imagining. I’ve imagined what it would be like to hug my parents, to go out for dinner, or have coffee with a friend. In fact, as I sit at my messy dining room table, frantically trying to finish this piece, I’m imagining what it would be like to work in an office—or indeed, anywhere—that is not surrounded by a vacuuming husband, a crying toddler, or a barking dog.
It turns out that I’m not the only one that has been using my imagination. Whether it be by planning a future event, fanaticizing about a post-COVID-19 world, building a hug-tunnel, or playing Animal Crossing, many of us have used our imaginations to help quell our pandemic-related anxieties, cope with periods of prolonged social isolation, and help ease the tedium that is life under lockdown. The imagination has also played into how we’ve responded to the novel coronavirus on a systems-level.
For instance, imagined scenarios are often invoked to maintain public compliance with a set of increasingly stringent health guidelines (ex. how would you feel if you were from a high-risk group? Or, what will happen if our hospital system gets overburdened?) (Vincent & Slutsky, 2020). They also underlie disease modelling, as projections of infection numbers, vaccine rollout, or ICU-bed availability are, ultimately, reflections of an imagined future (Toon, 2016).” Imagination also features prominently in epidemiological discourse. In May of 2020, ex-director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness Ali S. Khan stated that imagination was a crucial aspect of strategic decision-making (Quammen, 2020). In October, Harvard professor Bill Hanage critiqued the lack of creative-thinking in the UK government’s lockdown-focused pandemic response plan, lamenting: “Where is the imagination?” (Oluwole, 2020).
Read MoreA post by Sam Clarke
Pictorial representations are meant to explain performance in mental imagery (e.g. mental rotation) tasks. But the explanatory purchase pictorial representations afford here has seemed to stem from their representing shapes and orientations holistically, like a photograph. The trouble is: neuropsychologically overlapping representations in early vision do not encode properties in this way. They represent relevant feature types independently and non-holistically. In this respect, they are quite unlike photographs. But if the non-holistic nature of pre-attentive vision implies the non-holistic nature of mental imagery representations, how is the appeal to picture-like representations to explain performance in the tasks under consideration?
The answer is not straightforward. But we can, again, draw inspiration from research on early vision. Here, there is considerable evidence that distinct feature types are represented in independent ‘feature maps’ (Treisman, 1988). My suggestion is that the same is true of mental imagery.
Read MoreA post by César Schirmer dos Santos
Are memory and imagination two manifestations of the same capacity? Some recent work on the psychology and neuroscience of remembering gave philosophers a new occasion for revisiting this classical question. Based on evidence from the study of amnesiac patients, Tulving (1985) hypothesized that the abilities to episodically remember one’s own past and imagine future personal episodes are two sides of a coin. In line with this hypothesis, neuroimaging studies revealed that your brain operates similarly when you remember the madeleine you ate yesterday at your mother’s house and when you imagine yourself eating a madeleine at your house tomorrow morning (Okuda et al. 2003; Addis, Wong, and Schacter 2007). Still, a widely discussed question is how these two mental time travel abilities relate to each other. Are they fundamentally the same?
The empirical evidence is inconclusive. On the one hand, the neurocognitive system of episodic simulation flexibly uses the acquired “vocabulary” of objects and properties found in the past to construct re-experiences and pre-experiences (Suddendorf and Corballis 1997; Addis, Wong, and Schacter 2007). Thus, there is a continuity between episodic remembering and episodic anticipation (Suddendorf, Addis, and Corballis 2009). On the other hand, imagining the future is more effortful to the mechanism than remembering the past (Okuda et al. 2003, 1369). Thus, there is a discontinuity between the two varieties of episodic simulation (Schacter et al. 2012). But it is unclear whether the difference is of nature or degree.
Read MoreA post by Ying-Tung Lin & Vilius Dranseika
What is the relationship between memory and imagination? What are the differences and similarities between them? These have long been topics of interest for philosophers both ancient and modern, and recent neuroimaging findings have brought a new perspective into the discussion (Buckner & Carroll, 2007; De Brigard, 2017; Schacter & Addis, 2007). Various views have been proposed to differentiate between memory and imagination, e.g., views that focus on the differences in vivacity, factivity, causes. Here, we attempt to draw attention to a perspective that has yet to be explored: the perspective of studies on self-consciousness.
Read MoreA post by Antonia Peacocke
In imagining something, you can bring to mind mental images all of whose imaged properties—including colors, shapes, smells, sights, sounds, and other perceptible and sensible qualities—underdetermine the content of what you imagine overall, or its total (imaginative) content. You can take a mental image of a horse that doesn’t itself ‘picture’ any motion whatsoever, and use it to imagine something that necessarily involves motion, like a horse galloping down a track. You can use a mental image of an apple to imagine a perfect hyperrealist sculpture of an apple. You can use an image of a man you can picture in order to imagine James K. Polk, whose precise features you just don’t know. Let’s call cases like these “underdetermination cases.” I’m going to set out a couple of views that aim to understand the content of imagination in these cases, and then raise an unsolved problem for such views.
Read MoreThe 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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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.
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