A post by Ruadhán J. Flynn
Imagination is typically taken to play some role in our efforts to understand the perspectives or experiences of another, in both empathic engagement and social-epistemic practice. Of particular concern – for me, as for many others – is whether the role it plays is in any way epistemically reliable, given that our situated biases and assumptions seem to shape and potentially corrupt our ability to imagine another perspective. This is frequently apparent in the imaginative efforts of non-disabled people when imagining the world from a disabled perspective. It is, for example, apparent in the widespread ableist assumptions reflected in many thought experiments deployed in philosophy: Merleau-Ponty’s portrayal of blindness in his famous example of the ‘blind man’s cane’, Jonathan Haidt’s portrayal of autism as a cold, closed, robotic personal world, or Singer and McMahan’s portrayal of severe cognitive disability as a kind of relationless non-being. Socially dominant and cross-culturally pervasive assumptions about disability frequently see it portrayed as an inherently negative, defective embodiment which can and should be eradicated. These ableist imaginaries are dramatically at odds with – and often directly contradict – the testimony and expressions of disabled people. This seems to indicate that where our situated biases and assumptions are deeply rooted, we may carry them through our imaginative efforts.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Michele Moody-Adams’ recent book: Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. See here for an introduction from Michele. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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Symbols, Narrative Activism, and the Importance of Storytelling in Making Space for Justice
To a generation of postwar progressives, J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings was a foundational text. This, of course, makes perfect sense. In Tolkein’s imaginative story, a ragtag group of the downtrodden and exiled stand up for nature and peace against an industrial war-machine promoting an environmentally destructive monoculture. It’s no wonder that countercultural heroes like Led Zeppelin wrote songs about the novels, extolling their virtues.
Likewise, to a generation of contemporary right-wing activists, J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings is a foundational text. This, of course, makes perfect sense. In Tolkein’s imaginative story, a ragtag group of the authentic folk of the countryside stand up for idyllic tradition against a foreign horde of invaders promoting a community-destroying modernity. It’s no wonder that far-right heroes like Italy’s soon-to-be prime minister Giorgia Meloni give speeches about the novels, extolling their virtues.
The idea that the postwar progressive counterculture and the contemporary far-right would both embrace the same story as authentically speaking to their values seems far-fetched. Surely, one of these groups must be misunderstanding the texts. And yet, Michele Moody-Adams’s thought-provoking new book Making Space for Justice provides us with the necessary tools to understand this phenomenon. Social movements, Moody-Adams notes, are not merely seeking to pass policies or gain political power but are also attempting to shape our collective imaginations.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Michele Moody-Adams’ recent book: Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. See here for an introduction from Michele. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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Remaking Space for Justice, Literally
If imagination is the junkyard of the mind, then political imagination constitutes an especially messy area within it. Although the concept is often invoked, it is also often invoked in highly heterogeneous ways. What are philosophers of imagination to do with such a confusing concept?
In carving out a role for imagination in social movements, an innovation of Michele Moody-Adams’s Making Space for Justice is to turn what looks like a bug—the heterogeneity of imagination—into a feature. As she puts it, “the heterogeneity of imaginative activities and processes cannot undermine the projects of social movements because those projects actually presuppose that heterogeneity” (2022: 130). She accepts that there is a heterogenous set of activities and processes—which draw on different combinations of cognitive, affective, and volitional capacities, and often from different people—that generate the ideas, images, stories, and experiences that together constitute products of imagination. And it is these imaginative products, not their antecedent activities or processes, that play an important role in social change.
We will get to these imaginative products. But to start, I want to situate Moody-Adams’s account within the broader philosophy of imagination literature.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Michele Moody-Adams’ recent book: Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. See here for an introduction from Michele. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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Michele Moody-Adams’s Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope is a remarkable book. It is best conceived as an extended meditation on the various issues instantiated in the social movements that are (and, for that matter, have always been) such an important reality of our polity. These include the comparative importance of rigorous appeals to reason—a traditional domain of philosophers—as against appeals based on “rhetoric” and “emotion” (often disdained by philosophers); the importance therefore of language in all of its forms, including art, in generating new perspectives; the willingness to compromise one’s just demands in the name of constructing a “beloved community” that necessarily has to include one’s opponents and perhaps former enemies; and the comparative importance of “hope” versus “despair” in energizing constructive movements. She seeks no “algorithms” (p. 258) to resolve any of the tensions that she identifies. Instead the book models what she most supports: a genuinely respectful attempt to generate conversation and reflection about the most important topics of mutual concern even when the interlocutors may have radical differences of perspective about the causes, and therefore, their possible rectifications. She focuses on “progressive” movements oriented toward achieving what she (and, presumably, most of her likely readers) would define as “social justice.” But she is fully aware that there are distinctly “non-progressive” social movements whose reality must be recognized and addressed. Are they simply the Schmittian “enemy”; or, on the contrary, should we envision them as fellow human beings, with their own suffering, to be engaged in as part of a grand effort toward “reconciliation”?
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Michele Moody-Adams’ recent book: Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. Today we begin with an introduction from Michele. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope defends a “cognitive approach” to social movements, presuming that such movements often generate insights about political life, and its moral underpinnings, which can deepen social understanding and enrich philosophical reflection.[1] The book identifies relevant insights through analysis of the political struggles and social criticism generated by several social movements and their organic intellectuals. I consider social reform movements of the 19th century (mainly abolitionism), the 20th Century (such as the women’s movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the United Farm Workers), and the 21st century (such as #Me Too and Black Lives Matter). I also examine efforts to transform authoritarian regimes into democracies, such as the Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia and the Arab Spring. The book develops these movements’ most significant insights regarding the nature of justice, the demands of conscientious citizenship, and the role of hope in political life.
Read MoreA post by Nicholas Wiltsher
I’ve long been fascinated by Afrofuturism, without ever being quite sure what it actually is. Wikipedia rather unhelpfully says that it’s “a cultural aesthetic … an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation … a way of imagining … [a] genre”.[i] That’s a confused tangle of categories, and I’m not bothered about unravelling it. I’m just going to pull out a couple of threads and loosely weave them with some thoughts stolen from Michel-Antoine Xhignesse, with the aim of saying something about collective imaginaries.
Read MoreA post by Gerson Reuter
In recent years, a growing number of philosophers have argued for the claim that sensory imaginings can justify, in an irreducible way, not only modal beliefs but also contingently true beliefs about the world.[1] I agree with this claim. (At least, I hope it’s true.) At the same time, however, I am sceptical as to the success of existing attempts to demonstrate the epistemic potential of imaginings. In the following, I would like to present some thoughts on a promising proposal made by Joshua Myers (2021). My considerations are rather sceptical. But since I hope that it can be shown that imaginings can be justifiers, I would be glad to learn that there is no need to be sceptical in this regard.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Franz Berto’s recent book Topics of Thought: The logic of knowledge, belief, and imagination (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Franz. Commentaries and replies follow Wednesday through Friday.
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What do logics of imagination give to philosophy?
Introduction
The major aim of Topics of Thought by Franz Berto is to provide formal models of our thoughts (for the sake of this entry, simply, “logics”). It is primarily concerned with logics for the mental states knowledge, belief, and imagination. In developing the respective logics, the book explores a new approach to the logic of thought – a new, unified way of answering the question: given that one thinks (believes, knows, etc.) that P, what other Qs does one think (believe, know, etc.) by the logic of one's thought? Under which logical operations is one's thought closed? (p. 2, notation adjusted)
Here is a general question: why do we need formal logics to answer this question? Doesn’t cognitive psychology provide us with the respective answers? What does the investigation of formal logics of mental states add to answering this question? I think these questions are especially pressing, given Franz’s methodology in the book seems to be – besides taking into account intuitions concerning certain validities – to heavily rely on results from cognitive psychology (and philosophy of mind) and then build logics that satisfy exactly the logically relevant features that cognitive psychology ascribes to the respective mental state.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Franz Berto’s recent book Topics of Thought: The logic of knowledge, belief, and imagination (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Franz. Commentaries and replies will follow Wednesday through Friday. Derek Lam’s commentary proceeds in two parts; see yesterday’s post for Part 1.
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Modeling the Internal Chaos (II)
Picking back up from where I left off in yesterday’s commentary, if Berto’s logic describes an idealized scientific model of human thoughts, whether it is good partly depends on how well it allows us to represent the crucial aspects of the target phenomena, the same way any other empirical psychological models are evaluated. Berto has shown his formal language’s promise in handling a wide range of observation in human psychology. In this part of my commentary, I examine how well it represents two phenomena in belief-revision: (1) a-ha moments and (2) cross-attitude thoughts.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Franz Berto’s recent book Topics of Thought: The logic of knowledge, belief, and imagination (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Franz. Commentaries and replies will follow Wednesday through Friday. Derek Lam’s commentary proceeds in two parts; we will run part 2 tomorrow.
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Modeling the Internal Chaos (I)
Topics of Thought is a mighty ambitious book and a thought-provoking (cringy pun intended) piece of philosophy. It’s ambitious for trying to offer an over-arching framework for all propositional attitudes we call thoughts using the idea of topic mereology. And it’s thought-provoking in the way the approach manages to bring apparently different psychological phenomena under the single idea of the topics of thoughts.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Franz Berto’s recent book Topics of Thought: The logic of knowledge, belief, and imagination (OUP 2022). Today we begin with an introduction from Franz. Commentaries and replies will follow Wednesday through Friday.
Topics of Thought [ToT] features two co-authors across four of its eight chapters, Aybüke Özgün and Peter Hawke. It’s a contribution to epistemic logic, broadly taken as the logic of knowing, believing, supposing, being informed... It’s inspired by (1) a traditional view of what it means to think that something is the case; and (2) recent developments in formal semantics.
Read MoreA post by Katia Samoilova Franco
As Nguyen puts it, games provide us with an “existential balm” (2020, 21) – a balm against a variety of human ailments, such as the lack of moral clarity, boredom, or the fleeting nature of our existence. There are other balms available for these ailments besides games, but for those of us who turn to games over other balms, the peculiarity of games makes them a particularly effective balm. That peculiarity of games and their effectiveness as an existential balm is what I’d like to explore here.
Read MoreA post by Michelle Liu
This blogpost, as its title suggests, is about the role of mental imagery in comprehending language. Here, mental imagery is understood as perceptual simulation or perceptual representation without direct external stimulus.
It is widely known that mental imagery plays a crucial role in understanding novel and poetic language. The comprehension of some metaphors, as philosopher Mitchell Green (2017) argues, requires the construction of conscious mental imagery. Green calls them ‘image-demanding metaphors’. As an example, he tells the story of Wittgenstein’s first meeting with Frege, about which Wittgenstein recalled that Frege had ‘wiped the floor with’ him. As someone who had never heard of this phrase, Green (2017: 34) notes that only after having formed a mental image of ‘one person using another to sweep or mop a floor’, had he understood Wittgenstein’s point that he was intellectually dominated by Frege.
Read MoreA post by Kristina Liefke
Imagine swimming in the ocean on a cold autumn day: the sea is rough, the waves are splashing in your face, your mouth is filled with the taste of salt water (the example is due to Vendler, 1979). Much work in the philosophy of language and mind has identified the objects of such imaginative episodes with events or scenes (see, e.g., Camp, 2017; Dokic and Arcangeli, 2015; Walton, 1990). The latter are spatio-temporally extended situations that are experienced from some particular – possibly unoccupied – perspective (see D'Ambrosio and Stoljar, forthcoming). My post argues against the scene-view of experiential imagination, in favor of what has recently been called the propositional-attitude view (D'Ambrosio and Stoljar, forthcoming; Liefke, 2022). It identifies a variety of new support for this view.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.
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The Skill of Perspective Taking: Commentary from Amy Kind
It’s a pleasure to have this opportunity to comment on Heidi Maibom’s recently published book, The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works, which I read with great interest, and from which I learned a lot. Calling upon an extensive array of empirical research, personal anecdotes, and examples ranging from Shakespeare to de Beauvoir to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Maibom develops an account of empathy in terms of perspective taking, and much of the book is devoted to developing an account of what perspectives are and how perspective taking works. In short, on Maibom’s view, to take someone else’s perspective requires us to recenter ourselves away from ourself and towards that person.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.
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Three cheers for More Empathy with Some Additional Sympathy for Adam Smith’s Impartial Spectator: Commentary from Karsten R. Stueber
I comment on Heidi Maibom’s engaging new book with great enthusiasm. It is a pleasure to read and provides us with an astonishingly comprehensive exploration of the different perspectives that characterize the dimensions of interpersonal understanding within the social realm. Maibom distinguishes for this purpose among the agent, the observer, and the interactor perspectives (Part I, chs. 1-5). Based on an extensive review of the psychological literature and well-chosen examples from ordinary life and literature, she deftly analyses the nature of these perspectives and characterizes their potential shortcomings in conceiving of another person’s agency. Maibom focuses mainly on the agent perspective and our ability to acquire interpersonal understanding through empathic perspective taking, allowing us to grasp other persons’ emotional attunement to the world and their motivational framework for their actions. Right from the start, Maibom emphasizes that understanding another person has to be conceptually distinguished from becoming or being that person. Indeed, as she points out even our understanding of ourselves does not differ in kind from the understanding of other persons. It is only in the gap between us, associated with a clear awareness of the distinction between self and other, that interpersonal understanding takes place.
I will focus my comments in the following on the last two chapters of the book. I will be particularly concerned about the relationship between empathy and impartiality.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.
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Recentering Perspectives: Commentary from Luke Roelofs
The Space Between offers two much-needed things: a defence of empathy’s value and a reorientation of how we should analyse it. I won’t say too much about the defence: Maibom responds to critics of empathy both in philosophy and in the wider culture, making the case that empathy is a multi-faceted skill that often requires effort and care, but which provides a lot of valuable things when done well, some of which we can’t get elsewhere. In particular, empathy is not opposed to either rationality or impartiality, but is a key contributor to, even component of, both. On this score I’m in full agreement.
What I want to dwell on is the picture of empathy the book develops and deploys, which I think somewhat blurs or cross-cuts some common distinctions that philosophers use to analyse empathy. That’s not to say it’s idiosyncratic; the book’s picture is woven out of both everyday examples and empirical results, and left me suspecting that the picture of empathy given here matches pretty well how a lot of non-philosophers think of it.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.
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Perspective Taking and Social Difference: Commentary from Hannah Read
Talk of perspective taking—its benefits and its challenges—is ubiquitous across philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and more recently computer science. But for all that talk, relatively little has been said about what exactly a perspective is and what taking others’ perspectives involves. (A notable exception to this is Camp, 2013, 2017). At long last, The Space Between provides a comprehensive and engaging answer to these questions. In this exciting new work, Maibom draws our attention to perspective taking as a tool for achieving a fuller and more accurate picture of others, ourselves, and our shared world. As she rightly notes, we relate to the world via particular perspectives, which are themselves limited with respect to what they prompt us to attend to, care about, believe, and do. As she puts it, the “human point of view is always a view from somewhere,” and attempts to adopt a so-called objective or impartial perspective are futile (57). Instead, Maibom’s response to critics of empathy (which is a form of perspective taking, on her view) is that the antidote to the limited view of things that individual perspectives afford is not less empathy (or perspective taking), but rather more of it.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). Today we begin with an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Friday.
What do we mean when we say “take my (his/her/their) perspective?” In The Space Between, I set out to explore this question. Whereas it is often assumed that a person’s perspective reflects their comprehensive way of seeing the world as a result of their unique backgrounds and personalities, I argue that a first-person perspective represents a relatively invariant way of seeing the world common to all people and other organisms. It is, if you like, the form of our perspectives which, of course, also have contents (though those contents are themselves affected by their form). Such a perspective involves a distinctive way of seeing the world in relation to ourselves, and as a reflection of our interests as the beings that we are. This means that our pre-reflective way of seeing others is, in fact, in terms of the significance those people—their thoughts, feelings, and actions—have to us. Following the literature in psychology, I call our pre-reflective way of experiencing and thinking about the world, an ‘agent perspective’ and our pre-reflective way of experiencing and thinking about others, when we are not directly interacting with them, an ‘observer perspective.’ The empirical literature shows that there are subtle, but significant, differences between the way we think of ourselves and “our” world (from an agent perspective) and how we think of others and their world (from an observer perspective). The philosophical literature, particularly that grounded in the phenomenological tradition, gives us further reasons to believe that we are situated in the world, not primarily as epistemological consumers—or thinkers, to put it more simply—but as actors. I focus mainly on agent and observer perspectives because a) they are the best documented in the empirical literature and my aim is to provide an empirically adequate account, and b) they are the most relevant when it comes to perspective taking. It should not be ignored, however, that when we interact with others, we do not do so as observers, nor do we do so from a pure agent-perspective because their very presence affects our own perspective. I discuss this phenomenon, but acknowledge here that much more work needs to be done in this area.
Read MoreA post by Jennifer Church
Here are three cases where I could perceive something but I decide it is best left to the imagination:
I am talking to my sister via zoom, and request that we not use video.
I wonder what a friend would think of an idea I have; I would rather imagine her response than ask for it.
I walk by a room I used to teach in, recall how it looked, and choose not to revisit it.
What explains these preferences? Several different considerations are at play, several of which reflect something important about the difference between perceiving and imagining.
For the purposes of this post, I restrict myself to cases where the imagining is accurate. I am not thinking of cases where I imagine my sister to be smiling when she is actually frowning, where I imagine my friend being supportive when actually she would disapprove, or where I imagine a classroom to be bigger and brighter than it really is.
Read More