This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s (eds.) recent book: Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran. Today we have our first commentary from André Sant’Anna. Additional commentaries will appear the rest of the week.
The (dis)continuism debate—the debate over whether there is a difference of kind between memory and imagination—has been at the heart of many recent disputes in the philosophy of memory and imagination (Michaelian et al., 2022). The five chapters in Part I of Berninger and Vendrell Ferran’s excellent new edited collection Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination tackle key questions concerning the nature of memory and imagination, and, as a result, make important contributions to the ongoing dispute between continuists and discontinuists.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s (eds.) recent book: Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination. Today we begin with an introduction from Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran. Commentaries will follow Tuesday through Friday.
When we, Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, met at a conference some years ago and started to share our research projects on memory and imagination respectively, we soon realized that a book combining both fields of research would be a valuable addition to the current research landscape. The idea of an edited volume was born, and we soon began commissioning articles. Our edited volume Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination (Routledge 2022) was published in November last year. When Amy Kind invited us to organize a symposium on our recently published volume on her blog The Junkyard, we were delighted to be offered the opportunity to present our book to a wider audience.
Read MoreA post by Dan Cavedon-Taylor
That night, Wang sat in his study and admired the few landscape photographs, his works he was the most proud of, hanging on the wall. His eyes fell on a frontier scene: a desolate valley terminating in a snowcapped mountain. On the nearer end of the valley, half of a dead tree, eroded by the vicissitudes of many years, took up one-third of the picture. In his imagination, Wang placed the figure that lingered in his mind at the far end of the valley. Surprisingly, it made the entire scene come alive, as though the world in the photograph recognized that tiny figure and responded to it, as though the whole scene existed for her.
He then imagined her figure in each of his other photographs, sometimes pasting her two eyes into the empty sky over the landscapes. Those images also came alive, achieving a beauty that Wang had never imagined. Wang had always thought that his photographs lacked some kind of soul.
Now he understood that they were missing her.
--Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem (translated by Ken Liu)
Cognitive penetration is said to occur if what one believes or desires, or expects, etc. directly affects how one perceives. For instance, perhaps believing someone is angry makes their neutral face look as if it is expressing anger (Siegel 2012). Maybe a desire for wealth makes coins look larger than they would otherwise (Stokes 2012; Bruner & Goodman 1947). And feasibly, believing that a piece of meat came from a factory farmed animal may make it taste extra salty (Anderson & Barrett 2016).
There is substantial disagreement over whether cognitive penetration does in fact occur.
Read MoreA post by Sabine Winters
Somnium, seu Opus posthumum de astronomia lunari – ‘The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy’ by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) tells the (story of a dream about the) adventures of Duracotus who, after much wandering and lengthy training in astronomy, is transported to the Moon by occult forces and the services of a demon. It was written over a period of more than 21 years (1609–1630) and published posthumously in 1634 by Kepler’s son Ludwig. Somnium discusses a wide range of topics but most extensively the movement of the Earth around its own axis, as Kepler writes:
The object of my Somnium, was to work out, through the example of the Moon, an argument for the motion of the Earth; or rather, to overcome objections taken from the general opposition of mankind. (Kepler, Somnium, ed. Lear (1965), Note 3,89.)
Somnium is not simply an exercise of idle imagination, full of metaphors and allegories for their own sake. Rather, Somnium aims to foster a better understanding of the structures of the universe by actively prompting the audience to imagine what (the motions of) the Earth would look like from the Moon. In this perspective, Somnium should be understood a thought experiment in which imagination is a guide to epistemic possibilities.
Read MoreA post by Andrea Rivadulla-Duró
“But although I now know, intellectually, that this memory was ‘false,’ it still seems to me as real, as intensely my own, as before.”
Oliver Sacks
“That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
Haruki Murakami
The other day, while going over childhood memories with my sisters, I found out that the summer beach house I had always remembered as blue was actually yellow. The evidence was overwhelming: not only did my sisters attest to it, but a photo album also proved unequivocally that the house was indeed yellow. However, although I immediately surrendered to the evidence, the inaccurate memory of the blue house still remains shrouded in a halo of reality when I evoke it. Although I now believe that the house was yellow, the episodic representation of the house painted in blue is still accompanied by the feeling of pastness and familiarity that usually accompanies episodic memories (Russell, 1921:163). Complementarily, although I can represent the real yellow house concordantly with my updated belief, this representation lacks the phenomenological texture of recollection.
This phenomenon is known as non-believed memories (Mazzoni, Scoboria and Harvey, 2010; Otgaar, Scoboria, Mazzoni, 2014). This label refers to episodic representations that one used to take as memories and that still come accompanied by the phenomenology of memory now, even though it has been clarified that the memory is inaccurate (or even entirely false). Philosophers might claim that, from a factive conception of memory, some of these episodic representations are not indeed memories, but fictions, since the events represented never happened. However, non-believed memories can be only partially inaccurate (e.g., I never summered in a blue house). Following the empirical literature, I will refer to the phenomenon by this label (using italics to note that what is primarily meant by the term memory is that they have the phenomenology of recollection and not that they are entirely accurate).
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau’s (eds.) recent book: The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau. Commentaries appear Tuesday through Thursday. Today, Jukka Mikkonen comments on the papers in Part III: Imagination and The Cognitive Role of Fiction.
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The last section of The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition, entitled “Imagination and the Cognitive Role of Fiction”, contains four chapters that defend the view that one’s imaginative engagement with fictional works may lead to improvement in one’s social understanding. The chapters offer new aspects to the matter and provide a very generous amount of food for thought.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau’s (eds.) recent book: The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau. Commentaries will follow Tuesday through Thursday. Today, Paloma Atencia-Linares comments on the papers in Part II: Imagination and Engagement with Fiction.
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Part II of Engisch and Langkau’s Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition reminds us that the interest in the topics that occupied pioneers of the field has not faded. The five papers included in this section vindicate or reject familiar intuitions and/or present nuanced defenses of contested views on different topics related to our engagement with fiction. I will discuss only two of these papers but let me briefly give you an idea of what the others are about. They’re certainly worth your while!
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau’s (eds.) recent book: The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau. Commentaries will appear Tuesday through Thursday. Today, Michel-Antoine Xhignesse comments on the papers in Part 1: Fiction and The Definition of Imagination.
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Blood and Phlegm: Deflating Fiction
The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition opens with a deflationary broadside against some well-loved (and well-worn) intuitions about fiction and the imagination.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau’s (eds.) recent book: The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition. Today we begin with an introduction from Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau. Commentaries will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
Recent philosophy of fiction in the analytic tradition has concerned itself extensively with the distinction between fiction and non-fiction and why this distinction matters. Following the pioneering work of Kendall Walton (1990), Gregory Currie (1990) and Peter Lamarque & Stein Haugom Olsen (1994), three general theses have been particularly scrutinized: one concerning the definition of fiction, one concerning our engagement with fiction, and one concerning our learning from fiction. The volume presents new research on each of these theses.
Read MoreA post by Em Walsh
The choice to love is a choice to connect – to find ourselves in the other.
bell hooks
Imagine the following two scenarios. The first involves a conversation with a friend. My friend has told me they are experiencing discrimination for being Latinx at university. They tell me that they are mocked for not having sufficient knowledge of their second language after having just moved to the university from abroad. I respond with a quiz instead of comfort by querying what proof they have that it is legitimate discrimination over someone having a bad day at said university.
The second involves an encounter with a stranger, a new student in my class. She tells me that, as a woman, when she wants to speak in class, she cannot, no matter how hard she tries. When I ask her why she responds that she feels like she has a choker on that tightens after every word and that she imagines others in the room could tighten it too. Rather than try to imagine what she is going through, I respond by saying that she should raise her hand and speak. I haven’t tried to imagine what it feels like to have her experience of talking.
In both cases, I have failed my friend and the stranger. The question lies in how exactly I have failed them.
Read MoreA post by Luke Roelofs
What is the relationship, if any, between gender and imagination? Of course one familiar point is that we often face interesting challenges in imagining across demographic and interpersonal difference, and gender difference are a prime example of that. But I’m interested in the thought that gender might be connected to imagination in a closer and more distinctive way.
Read MoreA post by Uku Tooming
According to sentimental perceptualism (or emotional perceptualism), affective experience is a basic source of knowledge about normative and evaluative matters, like perceptual experience is the basic source of knowledge about descriptive matters (see Milona & Naar 2020; Tappolet 2016). One way to cash this out is in terms of justification: affective experiences about X (where X is some scenario or situation) can immediately (but defeasibly) justify evaluative judgments about X, like perceptual experiences can immediately (but defeasibly) justify descriptive judgments.
For the perceptual analogy to hold promise, it should be substantive enough to make it plausible that affect is a fitting candidate for being basic source of justification in the same way as perception is. In particular, there should be epistemically significant common features that are shared both by perception and affective experience.
Read MoreThe Junkyard will be on hiatus for the next few weeks. We will return in mid-January with new weekly postings. We have some exciting things on tap for 2022, including book symposia on The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition (edited by Patrick Engisch and Julia Langkau) and Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination (edited by Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran).
As always, if you have suggestions for people whom we should contact to write for us, or if you'd like to write something for us yourself, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Our best wishes for a restful and restorative break and a happy new year!
Read MoreA post by Neil Van Leeuwen
Philosophers who wish to understand what imagination is often feel tempted to pose the following sorts of question:
1. Is X really imagination? [for various candidate mental states and/or processes X]
2. Does imagination require Y? [for various mental phenomena Y]
For the X place in 1, we get candidates like the following: episodic memory, beliefs that incorporate mental imagery, beliefs concerning counterfactual scenarios, suppositional thought that lacks mental imagery, florid delusions that don’t generate behavior like typical beliefs do (and hence might be imaginings), dreams, etc. The idea seems to be that if we can ‘correctly’ categorize such phenomena and ‘borderline cases’ in terms of whether they ‘really are’ imagination, then we’ll be closer to having a handle on what imagination fundamentally is: that is, if we work out the extension of “imagination” all the way to the corners—so the thinking goes—we’ll be much closer to being able to figure out what it is that unites that extension . . . which will give us what imagination is!
For the Y place in 2, we get candidates like the following: mental imagery, a distinct cognitive attitude (distinct from belief), counterfactual contents, fictional contents, consciousness awareness, simulation, ongoing active processing, etc., all of which have been floated as candidate phenomena for being requirements or necessary conditions on imagination. The approach is to find all the Y for which you can say the following: If a mental state or process doesn’t involve Y, it can’t be a state or process of imagining. The hope is that, once we figure out all the Y. . . that will give us what imagination is!
And since we all want to know what imagination is, we fall into posing questions like 1 and 2.
Read MoreA post by Daniel Kilov
About eleven years ago, I competed in a very unusual competition. This is how I remember one of the events:
“Ready…” the judge called out. “Go!”
I bolted from my starting point and barreled through my front door, narrowly dodging a sumo wrestler swan-diving into a giant dish of noodles. I made my way upstairs, noting a panda bear juggling pineapples on the landing. As I reached the top of the stairs, I paused as a steam engine barreled past, curving down tracks leading into my bedroom. I went in the opposite direction, where I found a gecko swimming in a bathtub filled with custard.
Anyone watching me, however, would only have seen me sitting quietly at a desk, head down, my hands shuffling through a deck of cards. I was at the Australian Memory Championships, using a technique known as “the method of loci” to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards.
Read MoreA post by Ying-Tung Lin, Chris McCarroll, Kourken Michaelian, Mike Stuart, and I-Jan Wang
How would you organize a workshop spanning many different time zones? You would need a good imagination to plan such an event. In order for the workshop to succeed, your imagining of the workshop would itself have to be successful. How would you write a blog post summarizing the content of ten workshop talks? You would need a good memory to tackle such a task. In order to accurately summarize the talks, your remembering of them would itself have to be successful.
Not coincidentally, the workshop on which we report here – Successful and Unsuccessful Remembering and Imagining, held online on November 14, 15, and 18 – was devoted precisely to these issues.
Read MoreA 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 More