Why Thought Experiments? — Putting Perspectives into Play

A post by Irene Binini, Wolfgang Huemer and Daniele Molinari

Imagination is ubiquitous and plays a central role in the most diverse contexts; we can wonder “what would really happen if…”, or “what would I actually feel in such a situation…” as well as imagine the most bizarre, dramatic or funny events just for entertainment, to express ourselves or to develop emotional bonds. No matter how you slice it – imagination is not just one thing. It is, rather, a heterogenous family of activities that serve different purposes (Kind 2013). These activities have in common that they seem to be free, unlimited and fancy. When it comes to assume an epistemic role, however, as it is the case in thought experiments, imagination needs, according to a widely held view, to remain within certain boundaries, and to have some kind of “anchoring” in reality and its most basic principles. Yet, thought experiments are fictional narratives that prescribe imagining counterfactual (or even counterpossible) scenarios. This raises the question of whether and how their cognitive value depends on constraints that guarantee the significance of fictional scenarios for the real world.

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Thoughts on Imagination, Responsibility, and Technology: A Deweyan Perspective

A post by Char Brecevic

This past summer, I taught a course on technology and innovation ethics at the University of Notre Dame. To my surprise, many of my students proved to be staunch technological determinists. According to these students, humans may be the creators of technologies, but their fate is ultimately controlled by their creations. We have little say in what technologies we develop, how we design them, and where they get applied. To make matters worse, although not unexpected given their determinist leanings, many students seemed fairly unconcerned about the lack of democratic deliberation in these various decision-making processes.

I had hoped that discussing nuanced accounts of responsibility in the innovation ethics literature (e.g., Grinbaum & Groves 2013; Vallor 2016; Ladd 1991) would help shine a light on how these young people might chart a new course—one marked by mindful, intentional, and answerable approaches to technological innovation. I was also hoping that the need for identifying key stakeholders and allowing them to take their rightful seats at the proverbial table would become readily apparent. The result was largely underwhelming. Perhaps the readings were a tad too long to hold an undergraduate’s attention. Perhaps the beautiful summer weather made it difficult to fully appreciate the import of what we were discussing. Or, perhaps, I needed a new pedagogical vantage point from which to make sense of my students’ seemingly apathetic and unfazed response to the mounting ethical challenges we humans face in our increasingly technologized environments.

Starting from the final hypothesis, my intent in this short piece is to offer a humble reflection rather than a declarative proposal concerning how educators working in this area ought to proceed. Serendipitously, I recently found myself crossing intellectual paths with John Dewey, and this encounter made me realize that he might have some valuable insight for educators, like me, who are hoping to change the hearts and minds of our future scientists, engineers, and innovators. Put very simply, I read Dewey as suggesting that the pedagogical obstacle at play is not one concerning the content of assigned readings, disciplinary differences among enrolled students, or general indifference. Rather, the obstacle is an imaginative one.

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The Dehumanizing Imagination

A post by David Livingstone Smith

I have been studying dehumanization for more than a decade, trying to understand what it is and how it works. In this short essay, I will share some thoughts with you about the role of imagination in the dehumanizing process.

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Which Came First, Creative Practices or Imagination?

A post by Max Jones and Sam Wilkinson

In any earlier paper (Jones & Wilkinson 2020) and a previous Junkyard blog post by Max, we suggested that (although we are both fans) the predictive processing framework has considerably more work to do if it is to provide a satisfying account of the imagination, and, importantly, more work than some of its key proponents seem to appreciate.

Our task here can be interpreted as an attempt to gesture towards and anticipate the implications of a positive account, consistent with predictive processing, on the foundations of our critical ground-clearing. Our suggestions, however, generalise and do not require any adherence to, or even comprehension of, predictive processing.

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Imagining Disjunctions by Cases

A post by Chris Badura & Tom Schoonen

The debate on the epistemic value of imagination is maturing (cf. Badura & Kind 2021). Here, questions about whether and how imagination has justificatory force have taken center stage. Discussions often focus on whether imagination justifies beliefs in modal statements, conditional statements, and even whether imagination provides us with justified beliefs about actuality. While these are all interesting and important questions, we think that one important question has not (yet) received the attention it deserves: can we imagine disjunctions?

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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?

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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.

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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’.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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(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.

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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.

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