Ignorance as Imaginative Resistance

A post by K. Bailey Thomas

In this post I provide a brief account of imaginative resistance that is rooted in ignorance. To be clear: here, and throughout the piece, I am referring to ignorance as ideology unless otherwise specified. This means I am considering facets and manifestations of ignorance that are not accidental or blameless but are manufactured specifically to harm others. This thought piece is inspired by my current manuscript-in-progress wherein I am exploring how ignorance is an essential building block in the construction of oppressive resistant imaginations. I am particularly interested in examining how our current understanding of ignorance relies too heavily on presumptions of innocence on behalf of epistemic agents, which allows an immediate association of ignorance with one being not at fault or responsible for their actions. By the end of this piece, I hope to provide a generative account of how what I call “Insidious Ignorance” remains a core component in both the construction and maintenance of resistant imaginations, resulting in various social, ethical, and epistemic harms.

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Conference Report: Stanford Imagination Workshop

A conference report by Avshalom Schwartz and Alicia Steinmetz

In recent years, imagination has become a renewed topic of interest for political philosophers. While political and philosophical concern with the imagination has a long history within Western thought, it has tended to be a marginal or ignored topic in contemporary political theory, in part due to the dominance of analytic moral philosophy and Kantian-inspired models of deliberation and public reasoning over the past few decades.

However, various developments in the early twenty-first century – such as the rise of new digital communication technologies, democratic backsliding, and new voices and strategies in political activism – have placed imagination back on the agenda of political philosophers. So far, many of these new explorations of the politics of imagination (and the imagination of politics) have occurred in isolation from each other. 

The Stanford Imagination Workshop, organized by Avshalom Schwartz and Alicia Steinmetz with the generous support of the Stanford Humanities Center, The Zephyr Institute, and the Transformation of Democracy Workshop, was envisioned as an attempt to provide scholars a formal and institutional opportunity to converse and exchange ideas.

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Looking for a Non-Representational Enactivist Imagining in the Junkyard of the Imagination: (it may not be there)

A post by Janine Jones

There seems to be a general consensus that imagining — sometimes thought of as seeing with the mind’s eye — is inherently representational. How could re-presenting to ‘the mind’s eye’ what is not present fail to involve a representation of that which is presently absent. Isn’t such a form of representation at the heart of what it is to imagine?

In this post, I take advantage of the bounteous nature of junkyards. I participate in a form of engagement that both philosophy and junkyards invite:  wondering and wandering. I wonder as I wander through the junkyard trying to imagine how what I am trying to imagine could be in the junkyard. I am trying to discover a type of imagining, in the junkyard, that bears representational constituents (perhaps even necessarily so), but which is, itself, non-representational, at least at the non-sub-personal level.

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What Is Mental Imagery Good For? Mental Rotation in Aphantasia as A Case Study

A post by Jorge Morales

“I just learned something about you and it is blowing my [expletive] mind. This is not a joke. [...] It is, I think, as close to an honest-to-goodness revelation as I will ever live in the flesh. Here it is: You can visualize things in your mind.” 

Blake Ross, Mozilla Firefox Co-Founder, April 2016

Late one night, Blake Ross discovered something incredible (as in almost impossible to believe): other people had visual imagery! Like Ross, a surprisingly large number of people (about 3-5% of the population) have aphantasia, which is characterized as the lack of mental imagery.

Seeing things in the mind’s eye is an important faculty during development, in art and science, and it has a tight relation to cognitive skills such as mental simulation, short-term memory and mental rotation, among many others (Pearson et al., 2015). Despite this, aphantasics do not seem to suffer from any noticeable deficit. Blake Ross founded Mozilla without even realizing he was aphantasic (or those close to him noticing anything was amiss). Millions more live oblivious of how different their mental imagery skills are (Lupyan et al., 2023).

But how can this be? One possible implication is that imagination—and perhaps even consciousness in general—is not as useful as we might think: people do not even notice when this entire faculty is absent! This, of course, goes against common sense and millennia of research. Philosophers have discussed the importance of imagination at least since Plato (Bundy, 1922; Schwartz, 2020) and Aristotle (1993), scientists have studied it and its effects for more than a hundred years (e.g., Kosslyn, 1980, 1996; Perky, 1910; Shepard & Cooper, 1982), and most of us seem to use it all the time. Could mental imagery be more epiphenomenal than we thought?

To address this question, I will focus on mental rotation and aphantasia as a case study. I will pose more questions than answers, but in the end, we may see that whatever the function of mental imagery during mental rotation is, it must be an incredibly subtle one.

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Salzburg Workshop on Imagistic Cognition: Some Intersecting Themes

A conference report by Amy Kind

How do we distinguish imagination and reality?  How do visual content and social context influence pictorial meaning?  What role does mental imagery play in belief?  And how do you make room in your refrigerator when you need to fit in a bunch of leftovers after a large social gathering?  These are just a few of the many questions addressed at the Second Salzburg Workshop on Imagistic Cognition, held last week.  Organized by Christopher Gauker (University of Salzburg) and Bence Nanay (Antwerp) as part of their Puzzle of Imagistic Cognition project (jointly funded by the Austrian FWF and the Belgian FWO), the workshop brought together 12 speakers drawn from disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience for three days of productive dialogue about the nature and extent of imagistic cognition.

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Book Symposium: Dunin-Kozicka Commentary and Reply

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Piotr Kozak’s recent book: Thinking in Images: Imagistic Cognition and Non-propositional Content. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Piotr Kozak. Commentaries follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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Can we be creative in using rulers and thinking in images?

And why even ask such an odd question? First, any time when we use rulers we recreate an old simple procedure — we apply the ruler to the thing to be measured and read the standardized measurement results. We are substantially uncreative then. Second, when we think in images our chances to come up with something new are good — for not only can we operate with images in many ways (e.g. rotating them, combining them, seeing them from a different perspective) but we can also arrive at a new image as a result of such operations. Indeed, we can be original when thinking in images. Why even put rulers and images together in this question then?

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Book Symposium: Rucińska Commentary and Reply

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Piotr Kozak’s recent book: Thinking in Images: Imagistic Cognition and Non-propositional Content. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Piotr Kozak. Commentaries follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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Piotr Kozak’s Thinking in Images is an insightful book that deals with some of the most fundamental questions regarding imagistic thinking, including: a) what is thinking?; b) what are images?; and c) what, specifically, is thinking with images?

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Book Symposium: Tooming Commentary and Reply

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Piotr Kozak’s recent book: Thinking in Images: Imagistic Cognition and Non-propositional Content. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Piotr Kozak. Commentaries follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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Thinking in Images is a rich and elaborate book that defends a view that images play an indispensable role in thinking as measurement devices. In articulating that view, Kozak covers a lot of ground by critically engaging with a wide range of literature and carving out new paths in the theoretical landscape.

Inevitably, this short commentary cannot to justice to the wealth of detail in Kozak’s book. For instance, the reader can find there a fascinating discussion of the representational role of knot diagrams and black hole pictures. The book also presents an innovative account of recognition-based identification in terms of construction invariants. These are just a couple of examples of what the book offers but that I don’t have space to discuss here.

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Book Symposium: Introduction from Piotr Kozak

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Piotr Kozak’s recent book: Thinking in Images: Imagistic Cognition and Non-propositional Content. Today we begin with an introduction from Piotr Kozak. Commentaries will follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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When we are asked how many windows are in our flat, we will probably form and inspect a mental image of the flat and count the windows. If architects design a house, they use drawings. You may use a map to get from Berlin to Paris. These are instantiations of what can be called imagistic thinking. The main question of my book is what such thinking can be.

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Empathy beyond accuracy

A post by Jimena Clavel

Is there any value to empathy when it is just an exercise in misunderstanding? I think there is. Consider the following case. In a recent episode of This American Life, “Nine Months Later”, we hear the story of Lilly, a seventeen-year-old teenager, who wanted an abortion after Roe v. Wade had been overturned (see Glass, 2023). Lilly found out about her pregnancy in the ER, with her dad in the room. She was shocked and she could tell that her dad was shocked too: but was he also angry? Mad at her? What was going on in his mind? She wanted to know. In the next few days, Lilly started making arrangements. Her dad checked in with her, but would say very little. For Lilly, this was a sign of disappointment. As it turns out, this was not how he felt. He might have been angry at first. But this was not all. When he heard about her decision, Lilly’s dad was surprised. With Lilly’s personality in mind, he thought that she might not want an abortion. He also realized that his own thoughts about what Lilly should do were selfish. So once she told him what she wanted, he kept to himself to give her space. He was worried that he might put pressure on her otherwise.

Something that caught my attention about Lilly’s story are the attempts both she and her dad made of reading each other’s minds. Both were concerned about what the other thought and both tried to put themselves in each other’s shoes. Their exercises, though, were not accurate. They did not lead to understanding: neither Lilly nor her dad apprehended each other’s mental states.

This conclusion, though, bugs me. These exercises are only unsuccessful when we think about them in terms of accuracy. But this leaves out other aspects of perspective-taking. For instance, although inaccurate, the exercises deployed by Lilly and her dad are caring: they acted with each other in mind. There can be something valuable and rich about these exercises despite their inaccuracy. However, to truly see this value we need to move away from accuracy as a measure of success. Let me rehearse my case for this.

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Imagination and Oppression

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’.

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Imagination in Fiction and Life: A Kantian Move and a Spinozian Countermove

A 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.

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Re-Imagining Episodic Remembering Without Episodic Memory: Or Why It Matters How We Imagine Our Imaginings

A 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)?

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The amorality of imagination

A 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.

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Imagining the questions people may ask

A 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.

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The Critical Reflective Power of the Imagination – And Why It Matters… A Phenomenological Account

A 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?

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Manipulating Imaginations to Spread Misinformation: A How-To Guide

A 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.

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Book Symposium: Commentary from Christiana Werner

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. 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.

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Book Symposium: Commentary from Seth Goldwasser

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 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.

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Book Symposium: Commentary from Eva Backhaus

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 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.

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