A post by Michael Omoge
In his insightful review of the volume, Epistemic Uses of Imagination (2021), edited by Christopher Badura and Amy Kind, Tom Schoonen (2022) raised a problem for the view I defended in the volume. I’ll quote him at length:
Another issue with respect to the justification use of imagination is that it is not often explicitly considered whether it is really the imagination that is doing the epistemic heavily lifting, or whether it is something else that does […] We also see this in the contribution of Omoge. He extends Nichols and Stich’s notion of scripts to, what he calls, modalizing scripts. ‘For example, to imagine whether zombies are possible, the relevant modalizing script (call it, a zombie script) is that which details how thoughts involving “consciousness” typically unfold’ (p. 84). However, as Langland-Hassan (2012) points out, merely suggesting that there is a mechanism that fills in the details and labelling it ‘scripts’, ‘does little more than provide space for an explanation to come’ (p. 162, emphasis added). This is especially problematic for Omoge’s project of presenting an imagination-based epistemology of modality, for it is the scripts, which consist of theoretical knowledge, that are doing all the epistemological work, not the imagination (Schoonen 2022: 3, original italics).
For a bit of context, let’s begin with what scripts are. Scripts have a long history in cognitive psychology as components of beliefs, which guide both reasoning and acting. According to Schank & Abelson, “a script is a structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in a particular context” (1977: 41). Thus, there is a restaurant that details how events in a restaurant typically unfold. My view, as Schoonen correctly describes it, turns on extending this notion of ‘script’ to metaphysical modalizing, e.g., the phenomenal zombie. Schoonen’s problem with my view, however, is that by relying on scripts, it becomes unclear whether imagination is doing the required work. Perhaps scripts are doing the “epistemic heavy lifting”, and, so, it is unclear to what extent I’ve described an imagination-based epistemology of modality. In short, Schoonen is saying that “scripting is not imagining”. This contribution is a first attempt[i] at showing why scripting is imagining. My submission is that if Schoonen is correct, then we would have to forfeit what we mean by ‘imagination’.
Read MoreA post by Marta Benenti
Climate Change in Fiction
Alongside the efforts of scientists and journalists to communicate the magnitude of climate change and the urgency of taking action to mitigate it, arts promise to play a relevant role in raising people’s awareness. In particular, over the past 20 years a new narrative genre has flourished called Climate Fiction, or, patterning after the more established “Sci-fi” label, “Cli-fi”.
Typically, Cli-fi stories present scenarios where climatic conditions determine the narrated vicissitudes and influence characters’ practical, socio-political, and psychological lives. Popular examples in the Anglophone landscape are movies like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Interstellar (2014), or Snowpiercer (2013), and novels like Solar (2010), MaddAddam (2013), or The Overstory (2018).
It is reasonable to hypothesize that such works may modify people’s view of current and forthcoming environmental disasters by increasing their sensitivity towards environmental threats and incite them to take action accordingly. Following this intuition, psychologists have tested changes in Cli-fi recipient’s beliefs. According to Anthony Leiserowitz’ 2004 study, for example, watching The Day After Tomorrow significantly increased viewers’ preoccupation with possible environmental catastrophes and influenced their opinions on the most adequate model to forecast climate changes. On the literary side, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (2020) showed that short Cli-fi stories affected participants’ beliefs in the anthropogenic nature of global warming and increased their risk perception.
Read MoreA post by Will Kidder
You trust someone to repay a loan, to give you honest and considerate advice, to remain faithful in a relationship, or simply to pick you up at the airport. How do you know whether they will honor your trust or make a fool of you? Do you need to “get inside their head” and imagine their perspective? Do you need to believe they have imagined yours?
In what follows, I would like to briefly outline a role for empathy, which I take to require imaginative simulation of other perspectives, in the assessment of trustworthiness. I will also explore how this relationship between empathy and trust might explain deep-seated distrust of AI-based decisions, particularly when those decisions involve AI’s assessment of a human being’s trustworthiness, as in the cases of parole decisions and credit scores.
I argue that empathy impacts the assessment of trustworthiness in two ways. First, empathy allows us to discover a potential trustee’s motives and assess whether those motives in fact justify trust. Empathy helps gather evidence relevant to trustworthiness. Second, a potential trustee can exhibit trustworthiness by making an effort to empathetically imagine the trustor’s perspective. Empathy can serve as evidence of trustworthiness.
Read MoreA post by Antony Aumann
Lovers of art often extol its cognitive benefits. Among them is its ability to aid our imaginations. Novels, movies, pictures, and poems can enhance our native abilities in this domain. They can help us imagine things we otherwise couldn’t imagine (Feagin 1996, 83–112; Gerrig 1993; Nussbaum 1990; Oatley 2016; Peacocke 2020; Rowe 2009; Smith 2011, 109–10). But how far does this go?
There’s a famous limit on imagination. It’s said that we can imagine what an experience is like only if we’ve gone through it ourselves (Peacocke 2020, 1). My question in this essay is whether art can help us overcome this limit. Can reading novels etc. help us imagine what it’d be like to have experiences we haven’t had before? I’ll argue that they can—provided we add some qualifications.
Read MoreA post by Max Haiven.
As a child, I was slow to learn, not because of any specific diagnosable developmental delay but because of some deep, abiding and often angry skepticism towards anything that seems to me to be an arbitrary social convention that was presented as an unquestionable truth. For example, I remember being called before the class for some task in school at the age of 7 or 8, only to inadvertently reveal I could not tell my right from my left. Red-faced, I threw a tantrum before my shocked and bemused classmates, explaining that the distinction was purely conventional, calibrated solely by, so far as I could tell, the doctrines of our forebears. Such orientation was a form of guided narcissism, rather than a material point of reference: My left, I ranted from in front of the room, was my classmates’ right, after all. Why do we even use these words? Wasn’t it a matter of arbitrary perception being passed off as an iron law of nature. How many other things had we been taught as truth that were, in fact, habits of collective thought? What made North up and South down? Why did certain letters have to make the sounds we associated with them when they were all funny symbols that exist nowhere in nature?
Read MoreA post by André Sant’Anna
Remembering, many authors have argued, is an inherently constructive process.[1] It’s not a mere reproduction of past experiences, but rather a reconstruction of them based on various sources of information. This has motivated some authors, most notably Michaelian (2016), to claim that remembering is just a form of imagining the past (see also Addis 2020). The question of whether remembering is a form of imagining has thus become a central one in philosophy of memory.[2] But despite its centrality, not much has been said about what exactly it means to say that remembering is or isn’t a form of imagining.
Read MoreA post by Amy Kind
There has been a huge amount of work on imagination published recently. There’s no way we could cover it all in this roundup, so we have limited ourselves to ten articles that have recently been published – articles that range across a variety of topics relating to imagination: pretense, empathy, continuism about memory and imagination, the i-desire debate, and much more!
Read MoreA post by Amy Kind.
As hard as it may be to believe, this coming weekend is the fifth birthday of The Junkyard. We ran our first post on April 3, 2017. When Eric Peterson first approached me to ask what I thought of the idea of our collaborating on a blog devoted to imagination, I was a bit skeptical. Were there enough of us imagination folk out there to make it work? Would such a blog really be sustainable? It turns out that the answer to both questions has proved to be a resounding yes, and I’m very glad I overcame my initial skepticism to take on this labor of love.
Read MoreA post by Julia Langkau
What is creativity? Margaret Boden (1994/2004) has suggested it is the ability of a subject to produce an idea or artifact that is valuable, new and surprising. Similarly, Sternberg and Lubart (1999, 3) think that ‘creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)’. Boden further makes the tacit assumption that the idea or artifact ‘was freely generated by the person concerned’ (Boden 2014, 233). Besides talking about a ‘creative’ subject, we can thus also call the required mental process ‘creative’, and we can speak of a ‘creative idea’ or a ‘creative artifact’.
The value component in the definition of creativity allows us to distinguish creative ideas or artifacts from what Kant called ‘original nonsense’ (Kant 2000, 186), which is an idea or artifact that is new and surprising, but lacks any value. Alison Hills and Alexander Bird (2018, 2019) have argued for a wider notion of creativity which does not require that the idea or artifact be valuable. Hills and Bird’s argument goes roughly as follows. When we look at certain ideas or artifacts that are the result of what looks like a creative process, some of them are valuable and others are not. Following the idea that creativity involves value, we judge that only the ones that are valuable are creative. However, the mental process involved in generating both kinds of ideas or artifacts must have been more or less the same, and it would be unreasonable to judge creativity on the basis of the product only. ‘It is therefore not appropriate to give different explanations of how each [idea or artifact] was produced—both are explained by the use of [the] imagination.’ (Hills and Bird 2018, 101) Hence, creativity cannot involve value. The authors conclude: ‘Rather than value, we propose that the imagination is essential to creativity: creativity is the disposition to use the imagination in the fertile production of ideas along with the motivation to bring those ideas to fruition.’ (Hills and Bird 2018, 105-106)
Read MoreA post by Christopher Jude McCarroll
Episodic memory and sensory imagination are very similar intentional states. On some views, they are in fact fundamentally the same (Michaelian 2016). On this type of view, episodic memory is continuous with sensory imagination: any difference between them is a matter of degree, rather than marking a distinct kind of mental state. Such simulationist theories typically stand in opposition to causal theories of memory (Martin and Deutscher 1966), which emphasise that episodic memory is a distinct kind of state to imagination, because remembering necessarily involves an appropriate causal connection to the remembered event. Remembering, not imagining, necessarily involves a memory trace, which connects the present memory and the past experience in the right way. Remembering, according to the causalist, is discontinuous with imagining (Perrin 2016). This is the so-called (dis)continuism debate about the relation between memory and imagination.
The necessity of an appropriate causal connection is one way of thinking about the relation between memory and imagination. In this post I offer a different way of thinking about the (dis)continuism debate. Rather than focusing on the content of such states, and whether this content is appropriately causally connected to a past event or not, I adopt an approach that is gaining ground in recent literature (Robins 2020; Sant’Anna 2021; Langland-Hassan forthcoming; Barner, manuscript), and focus on the attitudes involved in remembering and imagining.
Read MoreA post by Shen-yi Liao
Overview
Is imagining continuous with remembering? In recent years, this (dis)continuity debate has received much attention from philosophers of memory (including on The Junkyard: here and here. In a collection of forthcoming works—
—Peter Langland-Hassan shows how philosophers of imagination can contribute too. With his characteristic analytic acumen, Langland-Hassan’s forthcoming works clarify and advance the debate about the relationship between imagining and remembering.
In this debate, nearly all agree that ‘remembering’ refers to episodic memory.[1] But what does ‘imagining’ refer to? Langland-Hassan rightfully points out that philosophers of memory are not always precise about what they mean by ‘imagining’. And this is a serious problem because the nature of imagination is highly contested. On the rough characterization that to imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are, there are at least three dimensions of variation: modal, temporal, and subjectual. Most relevant to this debate are imaginings along the first two dimensions: specifically, episodic counterfactual thoughts and episodic future thoughts.
Read MoreA 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.”
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