A post by Nathanael Stein
I’m grateful to be invited to contribute to the Junkyard, first because philosophy of imagination is a new area of research for me, and it’s especially due to resources like this that I’ve been able to find my way around, and second because I ended up thinking about imagination in very much the way implied by the “junkyard” quote. I’d like to use the opportunity to pick out a couple of threads from what I’ve done so far that I think might be both controversial and worth developing, and I’d be interested to hear any reactions.
I came to the topic by way of thinking about irrationality in two different ways which converged. One was in relation to the “classic” Davidsonian puzzle of accounting for irrationality without having it collapse into covert rationality, insanity, or plain stupidity. The other was in relation to a passage from Middlemarch that simply stuck with me over the years as nailing something important about the way we sometimes go wrong, but which I didn’t see being discussed in the philosophical literature. The passage involves a dried-up academic whose sense of having passed up all sorts of happiness in his youth for the sake of esoteric research (no comment!) has led him to expect a happier future as something owed to him—as though he’s stored it up on credit and can now look forward to drawing on it in middle age.
Read MoreA post by Hannah Kim
Philosophers argue that imagination comes with varying degrees of sensory accompaniment. “Propositional/suppositional imagination” involves imagining that something is the case and lacks sensory aspects while “objectual/enactment imagination” involves imagining a particular object or bringing forth a selected mental state (Yablo 1993, Goldman 2006). If this distinction holds, imagining per se doesn’t require mental picturing. And this matters for philosophy of fiction because it shows how a content can be fictional without being objectually imaginable.
Setting aside the related question of whether there’s a special connection between fiction and imagination, I’ll show that skepticism about impossible, empty, and unlimited fictions is really about objectual imagination, which isn’t necessary for fictional truth. Not all fictional content needs to be imaginable in a phenomenologically robust sense. I’ll mostly focus on visual imagining, but the point generalizes to other senses; something’s being fictional doesn’t depend on its being richly imaginable.
Read MoreA post by Cameron Buckner
Nativists in psychology like Steven Pinker and Gary Marcus often warn their readers about the dangers of empiricism. In particular, they worry that many neural network modelers are reviving the minimalist goals of behaviorist psychology, which “through most of the 20th century…tried to explain all of human behavior by appealing to a couple of simple mechanisms of association and conditioning” (Pinker 2003) without any other forms of innate structure whatsoever (see, e.g., Marcus, 2018). Unfortunately, as their fellow nativists Laurence & Margolis (2015) observe, casting current disputes in cognitive science in these terms has the consequence that “the empiricists” no longer really exist…and maybe never did. While most empiricists are like radical behaviorists in eschewing innate ideas, almost all the other empiricists agree that a significant amount of innate, general-purpose cognitive machinery is required to extract abstract ideas from experience.
Recent criticisms of “Deep Learning” (LeCun, Bengio, & Hinton 2015) are a case in point (e.g. Marcus 2018; Lake et al. 2017). Critics worry that all the impressive things that Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) appear to do—from recognizing objects in photographs at human or superhuman levels of accuracy, beating human experts at chess, Go, or Starcraft II, or predicting protein folds better than molecular biologists who have devoted their lives to the task—are just the results of massive amounts of computation being directed at “statistics”, “linear algebra”, or “curve-fitting”, which, without the structure provided by innate ideas, will never scale up to human-like intelligence. Of course, everything the brain does could be described as mere “neural firings”, so the problem can’t just be that a DNN’s operations can be thinly redescribed; there must be specific things that human brains can do which DNNs, in principle, cannot. Many other suggestions have been offered here, but to illustrate my points about empiricism and cognitive architecture, I will focus on a brilliant list of operations that Jerry Fodor (2003) thinks are required for rational cognition but that empiricists cannot explain. This list includes:1) synthesizing exemplars of abstract categories for use in reasoning, 2) fusing together simpler ideas into novel composites (e.g. unicorn), 3) making decisions in novel contexts on the basis of simulated experience, and 4) distinguishing causal and semantic relations between thoughts.
Read MoreA post by Egil Asprem
Imaginative initiates
In 1888, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn opened the doors to its Isis-Urania Temple in London. Founded by a coterie of Freemasons immersed in Victorian occultism, this initiatory order soon attracted an esteemed membership of upper- and middle-class Victorians, including the Irish author William Butler Yeats, the actress, composer and director Florence Farr, and the theater manager Annie Horniman. In the Golden Dawn they found an elaborate set of initiation rituals that invoked a mythical past of secret Rosicrucian lineages and ancient Egyptian wisdom; but at its center was a curriculum for the practice of ceremonial magic. Initiates like Yeats, Farr, and Horniman would learn to have clairvoyant visions, travel to other worlds in their “astral bodies,” and communicate with angels and other spiritual beings.
As historian Alexandra Owen (2004) has suggested, a main attraction of Golden Dawn magic was that it provided an exploration of subjectivity, inner worlds, and the imagination, a “place of enchantment” at a time of rapid modernization. While couched in a language of primordial tradition, the order’s practices drew heavily on a fashionable interest in psychology and the unconscious. Imagination, dreams, and unusual experiences were cast as ways of gaining knowledge, whether of the “subliminal self” or layers of reality otherwise hidden from view.
The practices through which the Golden Dawn attempted to achieve such illumination has provided scholars with a model case of the human ability to induce experiences that have typically been labelled either “supernatural” or “hallucinatory”, depending on one’s ontological commitments. Central to these practices was the training of the imagination.
Read MoreA report by Andrea Blomkvist
The relation between imagination and perception is a topic which has drawn the attention of philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists for some time now. However, unlike some topics where interest wanes with time, interest in this theme has clearly intensified. This much was evident from our most recent installment of the Northern Imagination Forum, with the theme “Imagination and Perception”, which was held online on the 20th of January 2022 and which drew over 40 participants from across the world. Our speakers – Fiona Macpherson, Nadine Dijkstra, Ophelia Deroy, and Elisabeth Camp – delivered highly relevant and stimulating talks on various aspects of the theme, such as the phenomenology of visual imagery and visual perception, the neural basis of reality-monitoring, how to explain experiences of extraordinary perception, and how artworks in different media deploy imagination to express perspectives.
Read MoreA post by Simon Evnine
In his well-known book, Benedict Anderson (2006) describes nations as imagined communities. This is a haunting and suggestive expression and I want here to think a bit about the relation between nation and imagination. Anderson says relatively little about how to understand the expression but it is not too hard to see some of what he is getting at. Nations exist as collective projects of the imagination of their members. But what is it, precisely, that is supposed to be imagined? And how does the imagining of whatever it is ground the existence of a nation or otherwise figure into its mode of being?
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA 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.”
Read MoreA 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?
Read MoreA 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?
Read MoreA 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)
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA 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?
Read MoreA 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 MoreA 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 MoreA 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