A post by Nils-Hennes Stear and Robin Zheng
Suppose you visualize punching a colleague, indulge a risqué sexual fantasy, or engage in blackface. Suppose further that, in doing so, you mean nothing by it, doing so in a spirit of free play. Finally, suppose no harmful consequences ensue. One might nonetheless wonder: is there something inherently wrong with so imagining? This is the question we attempt to answer in ‘Imagining in Oppressive Contexts’.
Read MoreA post by Enrico Terrone
A popular view in contemporary aesthetics, which draws on seminal essays by Kendall Walton (1990) and Gregory Currie (1990), states that fictions are prescriptions to imagine. Here, I’ll not discuss this view but just endorse it with the aim of considering whether fictions prescribe a sui generis imaginative experience or rather mobilize the same sort of imagination that one deploys when one thinks about one’s life. The latter imaginative episodes are those that occur, for instance, when one imagines how one’s life would have been had one made different choices—the sort of imagining that may trigger affects such as anxiety or regret.
First, I will offer a Kant-inspired account of fictional worlds that seems capable of sharply distinguishing the imaginative response to fiction from imagination about one’s life. Secondly, I will consider a Spinoza-inspired strategy to bridge that apparent (Kantian) gap between those two sorts of imagination.
Read MoreA post by Daniel D. Hutto
How is episodic remembering related to imagining? Where once philosophers had little to say on this question, today much ink is being spilled in efforts to answer it (see, e.g., Berninger & Ferran’s excellent 2023 collection). This is perhaps unsurprising since in the wake of constructivist and simulationist theories of episodic memory and mental time travel, we have been confronted with the philosophically juicy possibility that “to remember, it turns out, is just to imagine the past” (Michaelian 2016, p. 14, p. 120, see also Gerrans & Kennett 2010, De Brigard 2014).
With respect to current discussions in the literature, several authors are asking just how continuous or discontinuous episodic remembering might be with respect to imagining. I am not convinced that framing this question in terms of continuity is all that helpful. But if we are interested in meaningfully asking how episodic remembering relates to imagining or in what way or ways it is involved in episodic remembering then we need clarity on the kind of imagining we have in mind – is it imagistic, reconstructive, attitudinal, all of the above, or something else?
Perhaps a more open way of approaching the question would be to ask, simply: Where, and how, does imagining come into the story of episodic remembering? Is it that episodic remembering is a kind of imagining? Or is it, rather, merely that they share the same cognitive basis? Or do they, in essence, involve taking up essentially the same kind of mental attitude toward possible happenings in one’s personal life – even though episodic remembering is necessarily backward-facing whereas imagining can be more temporally free-ranging (Langland-Hassan 2015, 2023)?
Read MoreA post by Adriana Clavel-Vázquez
I’ve recently wrapped up a project on the ethics of imagination. After years of work, here is the gist of my final report: there’s no such thing as the ethics of imagination. While it might seem like some imaginings are ethically relevant, it is actually non-imaginative states that are amenable to ethical assessment. But qua imagination, there is nothing of ethical relevance to evaluate.
Read MoreA post by Felipe Morales Carbonell
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about an idea I found in R.G. Collingwood, which is that understanding is not only the grasp of propositions, but also, and perhaps more crucially, of questions. The idea is rich in consequences, but here I want to focus on one aspect of it that raises some interesting issues for the philosophy of the imagination. Specifically, I want to explore how Collingwood’s idea can apply to the problem of understanding people through the use of the imagination.
Read MoreA post by Smaranda Aldea
To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world (Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life).
Street walking – free wandering, without aim or worry. Flâneur extraordinaire, Baudelaire brings into relief the embodied freedom such street walking – flânerie – entails. The flâneur is at home in the urban world: he is there to saunter and observe, trusting in his own invisibility – a liberating kind of invisibility. Lauren Elkin writes, ‘Flâneuse [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities. That is an imaginary definition. Most French dictionaries don’t even include the word’ (Elkin 2016, 7). There is a culturally coded, gendered dimension to flânerie: its radical embodied freedom is something most women can only imagine. What happens when those of us who, due to deeply sedimented, embodied fears that unavoidably condition our urban walking experiences, imagine Baudelaire’s empowered yet relaxed invisible freedom?
Read MoreA post by Daniel Munro
Thi Nguyen (2021) describes a strategy someone with nefarious motives might use to manipulate people into believing misinformation. This strategy involves presenting falsehoods in ways that induce an illusory sense of clarity—a mere feeling of possessing understanding and insight when really one lacks them. This feeling can stop someone from subjecting a piece of information to scrutiny or attempts to verify it, since one already feels as if one has understanding.
Nguyen describes several methods for inducing a false sense of clarity. For one thing, work in psychology shows that we often use fluency and ease of processing as heuristics to show when we’ve successfully understood an idea. In other words, how quickly and easily we cognitively process some information correlates with how likely we are to feel we’ve understood it. While this heuristic is often a good, rough-and-ready guide, it means that presenting misinformation in a way that merely seems familiar, intuitive, and easy to grasp can lead to the illusion of understanding.
Nguyen also argues that manipulators can induce illusions of clarity by triggering thought processes that feel like understanding itself. While possessing knowledge merely involves the possession of individual facts, understanding involves grasping explanatory connections amongst a body of information. So, for example, it’s one thing to merely know the isolated fact that World War II began in 1939, but it’s another thing to understand why the war began, in the sense that one grasps the causal relations between various events that led up to it. So, a manipulator could induce a sense of understanding in her audience by presenting them with a set of falsehoods that seem explanatorily connected to one another, such that the audience feels as if they grasp these connections.
In what follows, I want to unpack how thinking about the imagination can help us better understand effective strategies for producing illusory feelings of understanding. I’ll argue that manipulators can effectively induce such feelings by capturing their audience members’ imaginations in the right way.
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. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran. Commentaries have been running the rest of the week; today’s is the last one.
Anja Berninger’s and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s volume “Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination” is divided into four parts. I will focus here on the last part, which is dedicated to a set of interesting and very challenging questions concerning the relationship between memory, imagination, and emotions. The first chapter is by one of the editors Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, followed by a chapter by the second editor Anja Berninger. The final chapter is by Fabrice Teroni. In the following I will give a brief summary of each of these three chapters and shed light on some interesting thoughts or arguments developed by each of them.
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. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran. Today we have a commentary from Seth Goldwasser. Additional commentaries will appear the rest of the week.
It’s not uncommon to hear that someone has a good memory or is particularly imaginative. At first glance, such attributions appear to pick out some innate quality or disposition. However, philosophers have begun investigating whether memory and imagination might be cognitive skills or abilities (see Hopkins 2014, 2018, 2022, n.d., especially chapters 1 and 4-6; Kind 2020, 2022a,b,c; Michaelian 2021; and my 2022). In that case, to have a good memory or be imaginative might mean being a skilled rememberer or imaginer. Or it might mean that one is able to accurately recall some detail or vividly picture some far-off, alien possibility (more or less) at will.
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. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran. Today we have a commentary from Eva Backhaus. Additional commentaries will appear the rest of the week.
If perception is a good source for knowledge of what is in front of our nose, memory is a good source of knowledge of what was in front of our nose yesterday, last year or some 30 years ago. Even though we know by experience and a whole bulk of psychological research that our memory might not be as reliable as we think, the capacity to look into our past is an important part of our self-understanding and crucial for many practices.
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. 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 More