Kant, Predictive Processing and the Ubiquity of Imagination

A post by Jacopo Frascaroli

My discussion here has been conveniently anticipated by last week’s post, as well as by a couple of older posts by Max Jones and Sam Wilkinson. It is about some recent developments in cognitive science that could be of great consequence for our understanding of imagination, in many of its varieties. The developments in question fall under the predictive processing (PP) framework (and related formulations: “active inference”, “free energy principle”). As a grand unifying theory of cognitive function, PP is one of the most hotly debated topics in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, one that arouses in equal measure enthusiasms and scepticisms. As an account of imagination in particular, PP is starting to gain traction (Clark 2015, Kirchhoff 2018) and to encounter objections (Jones & Wilkinson 2020). Here however I won’t try to assess the PP story about imagination in its details. Instead, I will try to trace this story back to its Kantian roots. As we shall see, PP seems to give new strength to a distinctively Kantian view of imagination as a ubiquitous mental capacity, a capacity far more pervasive than what is normally thought. This view of imagination could well be of value even if many of the details of the PP story turn out to be wrong or imprecise. Here I want to suggest, in an intuitive and informal way, what this view could entail and what scope and prospects it could have.

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Perceiving is imagining the past

A post by Michael Barkasi

We tend to think of imagination and perception as separate things. The sort of thing happening when I imagine a field of yellow daffodils in my "mind's eye" is not at all happening when I look at and see the bowl of cracked pecans on my desk. The latter involves the processing of sensory inputs (for sure), but not the unrestrained internal generation of figments found in the former.

A lot of philosophers and psychologists think this naive view is wrong. The idea goes that sensory input is often incomplete, and imagination fills in the missing gaps (Kosslyn 1994, Addis 2020). Seeing occluded objects as complete, i.e. "amodal completion" (Nanay 2010, Kind 2018), resolving ambiguous figures like the Necker cube (Macpherson 2018), and seeing colors despite insufficient light for color-sensing cone cells, i.e. "memory-colors" (Macpherson 2012, Brown 2018) have all been proposed as specific cases in which imagination augments perception with phenomenology-affecting representations. I'll call this the sprinkle view, since it holds that imagination sprinkles content into perception as needed to afford a complete experience of the world.

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The Logic of Pretext

A post by Neil Van Leeuwen

Straightforward action takes a familiar form:

Let my goal be getting cookies; let my belief be that cookies are in the cupboard; and (lo and behold) I get out my chair, walk to the cupboard, and open it. If my belief about the location of the cookies is true, then this action succeeds; if that belief is false (that’s not where the cookies are), it fails (it doesn’t result in getting cookies).

More generally, we act in ways that will achieve our goals, if our relevant beliefs are true. Following Davidson, many (if not most) action theorists add that the internal representations of the goals along with beliefs cause said goal-accomplishing actions.

Philosophers feel themselves on solid ground when proffering explanations in this form.

But I think many of us are on less solid ground when it comes to analyzing the mental causation behind actions that come with a pretext—where a pretext is (roughly) “a pretended reason for doing something that is used to hide the real reason.”

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Pretense and Mental Imagery

A post by Anatolii Kozlov

It is said that pretense behaviour requires guiders that can navigate and channel otherwise unconstrained imaginative activity.

For example, according to Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich, pretense behaviour is guided by the propositional instructions, provided by the Possible World Box, ‘a work space in which our cognitive system builds and temporarily stores representations of one or another possible world’ (Nichols and Stich 2000). The difficulty, however, is that if pretense behaviour is indeed fully sanctioned by these propositional instructions, to supply them there must be an infinite number of conditional beliefs that would define every single aspect of pretense behaviour. Suzanna Rucińska, identifies it as a problem of infinite regress (Rucińska 2014).

In contrast to the propositional view, Neil Van Leeuwen suggests that pretense activity is guided by transparent sensory imagination that can be a part of the visual field: ‘There exists a form of imagining that is a continuously updated forward model of action in the world /…/ A “forward model” is an internal representation of motor commands that anticipates the consequences of those commands on bodily motion. The “nonveridical” perceptual representations are basically mental imagery’ (Van Leeuwen 2011). On a parallel note, in (2014) he defines a constructive imagination as a capacity to form novel mental images out of memory ‘acquired by perceptual or other experiences.’ At the same time, he admits that the concept of constructive imagination faces a problem of under-specification. If in imagining a dancing cat one pictures a cat in tutu and not in a black hat, it is not clear why specifically such image occurred in imagination.

Now, if we disregard the exact format of guiding representations, both infinite regress and under-specification problems seem to be the two sides of the same coin. If pretense behaviour is guided by some mental representations, the question is how exactly those mental representations are selected and narrowed down, given the number of alternatives that are possible?

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Imagining a green technology between scientific scenarios and science-fiction

A post by Max Roßmann

“Microalgae nutrition will save us from climate change as they store CO2 and can be grown without arable land.”

“A diet with microalgae will ensure a better and healthier life.”

“Microalgae are the soy of the future, as they discretely and cost-effectively integrate into established food production systems.”

“Through small-scale and home-based algae farms, urban citizens will break out of the clutches of the food industry.”

Are you convinced now to try eating microalgae, to invest in algae startups, or at least to quickly search Google on whether there's any substance to the visions? In case it only irritated you to read about prominent visions of algae nutrition on the Junkyard, let me briefly introduce myself and today's topic:

As this article aims to bridge the gap between analytic philosophy and empirical Science Technology Studies (STS) for Technology Assessment, I, first of all, thank John Steward for asking about how much imagination actually is in sociotechnical imaginaries[1] and Amy Kind for allowing me to share subsequent thoughts in the wonderful Junkyard. I am a chemical engineer and philosopher and study the role of imagination for innovation processes and policy-making. When I started my first project about the “Analysis and scenarios for the use of microalgae as food” at the Institute of Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS), I was first of all fascinated by the manifold and sometimes crazy visions that circulated and engaged people. Since such visions, as depicted above, are not uncommon in the field of new and emerging technologies (NEST), we have a dedicated working group on Vision Assessment to develop theory and empirical methods for analyzing and dealing with visions. But why should one even care about imagination and science-fiction visions for policy advice in the first place?

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Imagination and Knowledge in Animated Documentaries… Or, what animation can teach us about the lives of others

A post by Bella Honess Roe

Suppose that you are a filmmaker who wants to make a non-fiction film or documentary about what it is like to have a particular mental health or neurological condition. Bipolar disorder, for example, or audio-visual synasthaesia. There are various approaches available to you. You could film interviews with participants who have first-person experience of those conditions. You could present various statistics and other factual information about the prevalence of these conditions and their symptoms. Another approach might be to get participants (or actors) to re-enact typical or witnessed scenes of living with bipolar disorder or synasthaesia. These are all relatively standard, conventional we might say, documentary approaches. An alternative approach that has, since about the late-1990s, become increasingly popular for making non-fiction films about such topics is to use animation (Honess Roe 2013). In these films, known as animated documentaries, the ‘world in here’ of subjective experience, is represented via animation. In fact, rather than the type of things that are physically visible, such as events that could be witnessed by others, or the ‘world out there’ that is typically represented in conventional, live-action documentaries, animation has been shown to lend itself incredibly well to conveying realities that are subjective and internal. Previously, I have described these types of animated documentaries, ones that convey subjective states of mind, as ‘evocative’. These are films that respond to the representational limitation that ‘[c]ertain concepts, emotions, feelings and states of mind are particularly hard to represent through live-action imagery.’ (Honess Roe 2013, 25)

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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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