Imagining with Emotions

A post by Heidi Maibom

It is common in the empathy literature to distinguish between cognitive and affective empathy. The former is based mainly on cognition, the idea goes, and is aimed at providing knowledge of other minds. The latter is based in affect, and its main purpose is to foster prosocial behavior and interpersonal connection. Perspective taking is usually placed in the cognitive empathy camp, as it is thought to be a purely cognitive exercise whereby we transpose ourselves into another’s situation. Some have argued that this method is particularly apt to produce affective empathy as a result, but that doesn’t really alter its cognitive status. I think this way of thinking is a mistake. Affective empathy is as well, if not better, placed to yield interpersonal understanding. How?

Read More

The need of a unified theory of imagining

A post by Luca Tateo

The multiplication of “imaginations” in current social and human sciences does only lead to a logic conclusion: imagining is a ubiquitous human act. Sociological imagination; ecological imagination; philosophical imagination; scientific imagination; musical imagination, etc.: the infinite list of new imaginations pairs along with the infinite multiplication of “intelligences” in psychology – emotional; spatial; mathematical; logical; visual; musical; you name it (Gardner, 2003). The result is to have a concept, prefixed by an adjective, which creates nothing but an umpteenth disciplinary boundary so that one can say, “I work in ecological imagination” and probably have a new journal with the same name. This will lead nowhere in advancing our understanding of imagination.

It may be time to rethink imagination as a higher mental function that is implied in all human activities. My long-term research project, culminated in the volume “A Theory of Imagining, Knowing and Understanding” (Tateo, 2020), aimed exactly at rethinking the way we consider imagination and at developing a theory of imaginative work as a higher mental function. In other words, I am proposing to develop a unified theory of imagining.

Read More

Conference Report - The Science and Philosophy of Imagination

A report by Luke Roelofs

Interdisciplinary conferences are often marked by a sort of fertile confusion. Nobody’s quite sure whether they’re talking about the same things, making the same assumptions, or pursuing the same interests, but the process of trying to figure that out can be very illuminating. The philosophy of imagination, as a sub-field, often involves a similar fertile confusion: philosophical raccoons clambering through the junkyard of the mind, trying to find, clean off, and exchange discarded fragments of ideas about fiction, modal epistemology, fantasy, thought-experiments, creativity, mindreading, and anything else that someone might describe in terms of ‘imagination’.

Read More

Interactive Religious Imagination

A post by Ingrid Malm Lindberg

Authors such as Ludwig Feuerbach (1841/1969) and Sigmund Freud (1907) have formulated critical views that stressed the connection between religion, imagination, illusion, and human wish fulfilment. However, on my account, the acknowledgment of imaginative elements in religion doesn’t necessarily mean that religion is nothing but a product of our own consciousness. On the contrary, it is more or less a general understanding among contemporary religious scholars that a significant degree of imagination is required when subjects form representations of a transcendent and sacred realm of reality (independently of whether or not they consider that realm to be metaphysically real).

Among philosophers of religion, a common way of talking about religious imagination is to compare the propositional attitudes of belief and imagination. However, if we are to give a fair treatment of the phenomenon of religion, it is necessary that we – besides propositional imaginings – also consider how sensory, experiential, and creative imagination contributes to a religious way of making the world intelligible (Malm Lindberg 2021). Nonetheless, in this post I will limit my discussion to include only the categories of mental imagery (sensory imagination) and propositional imaginings.

Read More

Imagination behind the scenes

A post by Sara Aronowitz

1. The Town

In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, the narrator’s uncle Toby builds a model town. Not a model of any specific town, but one that would stand in for many towns in the process of (re)enacting battles. Uncle Toby provides two specifications for the town:

The one was, to have the town built exactly in the style of those of which it was most likely to be the representative:——with grated windows, and the gable ends of the houses, facing the streets, &c. &c.—as those in Ghent and Bruges, and the rest of the towns in Brabant and Flanders.

The other was, not to have the houses run up together, as the corporal proposed, but to have every house independent, to hook on, or off, so as to form into the plan of whatever town they pleased.

The model town succeeds:

——It answered prodigiously the next summer——the town was a perfect Proteus——It was Landen, and Trerebach, and Santvliet, and Drusen, and Hagenau,—and then it was Ostend and Menin, and Aeth and Dendermond.

Imagination sometimes seems like creation out of nothing that quickly slides back into nothing, a game that starts when I close my eyes and begin to imagine, and ends as soon as I stop thinking about it. But there is something else to it: the bits and pieces of our imaginings usually come from somewhere, and after they are put away, we bring them back again later. Sometimes, the town was Flanders and becomes Brabant, and sometimes we break apart Flanders and years later put another Flanders back together. And through the time in between, something survives.

Read More

“Seeing” in Understanding

A post by Alice Murphy and Federica I. Malfatti

Philosophers of science have begun taking seriously the way that scientists use their imagination in modelling and theorising for epistemic ends. But what is the nature of imagination in science? It’s widely recognised that the imagination can take many forms. Consider imagining a tree in your garden. One way you could imagine this is by holding a mental image of a tree in your mind. But we could also imagine in a purely propositional way; i.e. you could imagine that there is a tree in your garden, without forming any accompanying mental image. Salis and Frigg (2020) have argued that it is only this latter type of imagination that is of import in the scientific domain. On their view, mental imagery is neither a sufficient nor a necessary type of imagination for scientific models and thought experiments. However, it is unclear whether their view is restricted to the role of imagination in acquiring knowledge as they do not discuss other epistemic or cognitive goods such as understanding. And while others, such as Breitenbach (2020), have discussed imagination in achievements of scientific understanding, it is not explicit what the nature of the imagination is taken to be. Additionally, the learning from imagination literature discusses different types of imagination, yet its focus tends to be on the imagination as a route to knowledge (for example, see Kind and Kung (2016)). This is especially interesting given that, as we shall see, language of “seeing” is often utilised in accounts of understanding.

Read More

How to Choose a Horse – in Pretend Play

A Post by Eva Backhaus

Take some stones and pretend that they are cars driving down a road on your table, now, one stone is not a car but a cow, watching the traffic, and then take two stones and imagine them to be a horse standing next to the cow. When I played this game with children they started to laugh and told me it’s ridiculous to use two stones for one horse. Since jokes are a good guide to philosophical problems I started to wonder why a stone can be a car or a cow or a horse in the same game, while two stones cannot be one horse. Once you start to think about which things can easily or naturally stand in for what it gets complicated: One stone can stand in for one ship and maybe for a whole armada, but less well for three ships. An object that is clearly bigger in reality should be assigned the bigger object in the game, and shape is important too: If you have a pen and an eraser the pen must be the street and the eraser the car not vice versa. This seems strange insofar as one of the most remarkable features of pretend play consist in the fact that props can, in general, stand in for any real-life-object we choose, regardless of their actual resemblance.

Read More

Practical Knowledge and Extramental Imagination

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 More

(Re)creation, imagination, and sunbathing

A 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 More

Tropes, Possibility, and the Folk Imagination

A 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 More

The rhythm of the eye: expectations, imagination, and aesthetic perception

A 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 More

New NIF Interview

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 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 More

Imagining Our Future in Space: NASA’s Sociotechnical Imaginary

A 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 More

Book Symposium: Wearing Commentary and Response

This 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 More

Book Symposium: Bolens Commentary and Response

This 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 More