A post by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich
The world is on fire, we have been told again and again. The seas are rising, the storm clouds are gathering. But who can fix a planet? We look outside and for most of us, most of the time, the weather is fine—maybe a little hotter, a little drier than the year before, but there is no catastrophe visible out the window. Because the climate crisis happens at planetary scale, on a timeline of seasons and years and eons, it is hard to see.
At the same time, many people are exhausted by the climate debates, which have been stretching on now for decades. Scientists are exhausted in their unceasing efforts to sound the alarm and provide further data on the likely consequences of human carbon emissions. Activists are exhausted by the trench warfare of policy reform and incremental political progress, where every yard of gain is seemingly offset by a reactionary rollback somewhere else. Climate anxiety can feel ubiquitous, but after years of blaring alarm bells, the dire warnings threaten to become background noise—a dispiriting drone for anyone paying attention, but too quotidian to catalyze change.
Read MoreA post by Milena Ivanova
When Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl performed their famous experiment, the results of which were published in 1958, their experiment was widely celebrated for its beauty, clarity and significance. The experiment came only 5 years after the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. This experiment aimed to offer a decisive answer to the question James Watson and Francis Crick posited in their paper ‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids’, published in Nature in 1953: how does DNA replicate? Three hypotheses about DNA replication were offered at the time: conservative, semi-conservative, and dispersive. Meselson and Stahl offered what many consider to be a crucial experiment that decisively answers this question in favour of the semi conservative replicon. The experiment is celebrated for producing important, clear and decisive results and to have definitively settled the question on DNA replication. Beyond producing these results, the very design of this experiment is considered elegant, original and beautiful, making it, according to many, the most beautiful experiment in biology. In ‘What makes a beautiful experiment?’ I have argued that what makes this experiment particularly aesthetically valuable is the relationship between its design and its results, and the original ways in which Meselson and Stahl decided to label DNA in the experiment, using density-gradient centrifugation to study the weight of the different strands of DNA they obtained during the experiment, rather than the standard techniques used at the time. This element of their experiment was original and creative.
Read MoreA post by Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng
Hess (2021) contends that critical reconstructionism and abolitionism prompt us to critically assess and change the conditions influencing our lives, whether through reform, transformation, or abolition. This transformative endeavour involves envisioning alternatives that diverge significantly from the current path shaped by converging crises. Music can deeply contribute to this imaginative process by encouraging us to perceive things differently, overcome limitations in understanding others, and engage in “freedom dreaming” (p. 273), a belief that dreaming is imperative for societal transformation, recognising that having a vision for the future not only informs present actions but also shapes society’s trajectory. Using this reconstructive standpoint prompts us to acknowledge that the evocative influence of music videos surpasses mere entertainment.
Read MoreA post by Margot Strohminger
Supposition often comes up in discussions of propositional imagination as a way of getting clearer on what the latter is (not): supposing that p is typically assumed to be different from imagining that p. We can thus expect thinking about the nature of supposition to help theorists of imagination—including readers of this blog—to understand their primary concern. (All this is not to deny that supposition is interesting in its own right. I think it is.)
In this post I will consider one account of what we are doing when we suppose that p. It is part of a recent reductionist theory of imagination defended by Peter Langland-Hassan in his 2020 book, Explaining Imagination. (This blog hosted a discussion of the book when it first appeared—for Peter’s overview, see here).
Read MoreThe Junkyard will be on hiatus for the winter break. We will return in mid-January with new weekly postings. Our best wishes for a restorative winter break, and we look forward to lots of great posts on imagination in 2024!
Read MoreA post by Neil Van Leeuwen
Is imagination epistemically safe?
In some intuitive sense of that phrase, the answer is yes. One can imagine outlandish and false things without risk of being wrong. I can imagine that I am a walrus without the epistemic failure that would obtain if I believed that I am a walrus. Sure, the content is false, but that’s okay: I’m only imagining it. The difference in attitude, even holding content fixed, makes a difference to epistemic risk.
The view just expressed is natural enough that one might even appeal to “epistemic safety” for the very purpose of characterizing what it is to have an imaginative attitude. Here’s Peter Langland-Hassan’s initial characterization of attitude imagining: “Attitude imaginings (or A-imaginings) are, again, cases of rich, elaborated, epistemically safe thought about the possible, pretended, unreal, and so on.”[1] Langland-Hassan’s subsequent theoretical task is to articulate the psychological structure of the mental states that fit that broad specification; if he does this well, he’s given a theory of attitude imagining.
Read MoreA post by Max Jones
I imagine that, if you’re reading this, you probably think the imagination is a good thing. If, like me, you find the imagination fascinating, you may have become fond of it over years of wondering about it, and may have been awed by the things that it can do.
I’ve recently been thinking a lot on Ryle’s “Thought and Imagination” (1979, 51-64) (which may account for the somewhat arcane style that I’ve decided to write this in, channelling an imagined hybrid of myself and Ryle!). Thinking about Ryle’s posthumously published work on imagination has made me begin to worry about the apparent goodness of imagination. I worry that we may have been missing something in failing to see that the imagination is often considered to be a good thing in and of itself.
Why is it good to use your imagination? There are obviously lots of benefits that can come from using one’s imagination, but we often talk as though there is something intrinsically good about using one’s imagination and perhaps even about imagination itself.
Read MoreA post by Ruxandra Teodorescu
As a genre, Science Fiction often engages with philosophical themes and questions, its genre conventions providing a unique platform for exploring philosophical ideas in imaginative and speculative contexts. Its emphasis on detailed worldbuilding creates an immersive experience, accessible through one’s imagination, from which one can emerge knowledgeable about subjective perspectives other than one’s own. While this epistemic access to different experiential perspectives is not devoid of challenges in practice, it shows how literature can engage the reader in moral dilemmas. Oftentimes, authors deliberately challenge or subvert traditional moral frameworks to provoke reflection and incite empathy.
Contemporary philosophers and literary scholars (most notably Nussbaum 1990) have theorized that reading fiction can encourage readers to shift perspectives and engage in moral exploration and hypothetical moral decision-making while contemplating their positions on and in these fictional narratives. Over the years these assumptions have been subject to empirical studies, which James O. Young (2018) summarizes for The Junkyard and assesses that engaging with fiction improves affective and cognitive empathy.
In the following, by delving into Amy Kind’s work on epistemic accessibility and studies of the moral imagination by both Mark Johnson and Mark Coeckelbergh, I argue that literary narratives allow us to probe moral norms and look beyond our subjective experience. Applied to SF, this demonstrates how the genre’s specific distance from and yet connection to contemporary times provides a productive playground for moral thought experiments. Finally, showing that the nature of ethical concepts and principles is not detached from their relationship to the world, I will investigate the example of C. Robert Cargill’s Day Zero to show how AI narratives do their part in challenging and furthering the ontological foundations of ethics.
Read MoreA post by Thomas Naselaris
For most people, it feels right to talk about mental imagery as a kind of visual experience. However, few experience mental imagery as being exactly like seeing, and describing the ways in which mental imagery differs from seeing is challenging. It is a bit like trying to explain the style of a visual artist whose works have been displayed to you alone. If it were easy to convey a visual style with words, there would probably be nothing special about it.
One of the goals of empirical research on mental imagery should be to develop and name concepts that explain, rigorously and measurably, what makes mental images so different from seen ones, while making clear the connection between seeing and imagining.
An important first stab at this is the characterization of mental imagery as “weak vision” (Pearson et al) . This characterization is certainly consistent with my subjective experience of imagery, which is weaker than my experience of seeing, and it is consistent with objective measurements of brain activity, which is indeed much weaker during imagery than vision (Breedlove et al).
Read MoreA post by Anaïs Giannuzzo
In 1975, something happened that would change our world: Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws was released. Since then, the shark population has has fallen to around 70% of the original population (Pacoureau et al. 2021). To say that Jaws was the cause of this would be wrong – our increasing appetite for fish combined with bad fishing techniques, our demand for beauty products (in this case: for squalene), and the lack of regulations are the main causes of the decline (Dulvy et al. 2017). But, as Christopher Neff argues, the representation of sharks provided by Jaws has made it okay for us that they be killed without much or any control (Neff 2015): in the US, a surge of shark hunters were exposing their catches with the pride of having eliminated a ‘man killer’ (Beryl 2012); Australia passed laws that enabled the killing of a greater amount of sharks than before (Neff 2015); and more generally, shark attacks were systematically reported by the media as though they were perpetrated by a rogue, psychopathic shark (Beryl 2012; Neff 2015; Peace 2015).
This is precisely the picture Jaws induced (not just the movie, the 1974-published book with the same title, too): a representation of sharks – especially of the great white shark – as (1) having intentions, (2) being blood thirsty, and (3) being a predator of humans. This (fallacious) shark-deviation is the so-called ‘rogue’ shark (the term originates in Jaws). Rogue sharks have the intention to murder specific humans, which they hunt for weeks or months.
I predict that most of the audience of Jaws would say that the representation of sharks in both the movie and the book is fictional. In spite of that, the representation had, for many, an impact on their daily life, as it shaped the way in which they perceived real sharks and saw certain actions as justified (see discussion of similar phenomena in Goffin and Friend 2022). So the question is, how can a fictional representation of sharks have such an influence when people know it doesn’t correspond to the world?
Read MoreA post by Yujia Song
I’m always fascinated by what happens at intersections of neighborhood streets. One Sunday morning when I went running, I approached an intersection with four-way stop signs. I slowed to a stop as I saw a car coming down the other street. I had the right of way, but I wasn’t in a rush, so I smiled at the driver and waved for her to cross first. The driver nodded and smiled back, and extended her hand to tell me to go ahead. So I crossed – quickly – and waved back again to say “thank you.”
Encounters like this fascinate me not just because they give me a warm, fuzzy feeling, but also because all the motioning at each other was entirely useless for practical purposes and even counter-productive (since it would have been much more efficient for us to simply cross the street in the order prescribed by the traffic rules).
Now if you’re thinking, but it’s not useless, then great, but we have some explaining to do. If the driver and I did get something done while not crossing (even when it was legal and safe to do so), what was it that we did? And how did it happen when we neither moved much nor said anything? Finally, to the extent that whatever happened during that time was indeed extraneous – indeed, counterproductive -- to our practical purposes of going somewhere, why did we do it? Was it just a waste of time? These are questions I want to explore in this post.
Read MoreA post by Martin Huth
As part of some work in progress, this article shall discuss a form of social imaginative resistance, which relates to the imagination of the experiences of individuals whose embodiment can be conceived as “non-normate” (Garland-Thomson 2017), i.e., people whose bodies are not in line with alleged standards of normalcy. This illustrates the phenomenon of a limited imaginability or even unimaginability not only of the various forms of existence of people with disability, but also more generally of human beings who belong to the domain of abject bodies.
Especially in the phenomenological tradition, accounts of empathy highlight the quasi-perceptual access we have to mental states and feelings in others. We do not encounter opaque but rather already expressive bodies so that we are neither in need to infer from behavior nor to simulate it in order to get a firm grasp of what is going on with another (Scheler even contends that there is a universal grammar of bodily expression; 1973). Imagination as a bodily practice – since mental activities are inevitably rooted in our body (Merleau-Ponty 2012) – forms a pivotal prerequisite for a more complex understanding of others because, for instance, motivations of mental states are beyond the direct accessibility of the other (Moran and Szanto 2020).
However, scholars in the field of (critical) dis/ability studies have highlighted a gradual or even radical impossibility of empathizing with people who are living with and through non-normate embodiment and a widespread inability to picture their lives as happy, meaningful and rich. Reynolds (2017), for instance, detects a frequent ableist conflation of disability and suffering or illness. This sort of misconceiving people with (variegated kinds of) disability has been explained by the differences between various forms of bodily existence. More specifically, the very orientation in the world through a particular kind of embodiment would not allow someone to properly empathize with and imagine significantly different kinds of existence, e.g., those with impaired vision, the necessity to use a wheelchair or cognitive disabilities (Scully and Mackenzie 2007).
Read MoreA post by Tomer Ullman
Imagine the following in your mind’s eye, as vividly as you can:
A person walks into a room, and knocks a ball off a table.
Hold the image in your mind for a moment.
Now consider, for the image you conjured before you: Did you imagine the color of the ball? How about the person’s hair, or clothes, or perceived gender? Did you imagine the position of the person relative to the ball? Can you trace through the air the trajectory that the ball took?
If you’re like most people, your answer to some of these questions was ‘yes’, and some ‘no’. Although you could easily fill in details as needed, you did not bother thinking about some of these properties when creating the original scene.
And that’s kind of weird.
Non-commitment has been noted (under different names) in both philosophy and cognitive science. In philosophy, the discussion of the phenomenon started in perception, for example asking how you can know a hen is speckled, without knowing how many speckles it has (Ayer, 1940). Similar questions were then asked of scenes before our mind’s eye: One can imagine a striped tiger without knowing how many stripes it has, or a purple cow without knowing its shade of purple (Shorter, 1952; Block, 1983; Dennett, 1986, 1993, and see also more recent discussions in Nanay, 2015, 2016, and Kind, 2017).
Read MoreA post by Sean Riley
Brains are weird. And minds are super confusing. Some people are just out there minding their own business, and then bam! Hallucination. Something is there that isn’t actually there, and that’s weird. Incredibly debilitating and tragic, yes, but also weird. Even weirder is that we can do this intentionally. You, right now, can sit pensively in your favourite chair and ask, “What would a giraffe in a necktie look like?” And you can hem and haw and conjure a giant giraffe in your mind, wrapping the latest fashion around its neck, just below the jawline, only to take a moment’s pause and go, “Wait a second, that doesn’t look right...” So you quickly slide that tie straight down to the bottom of its neck, just like God intended. That’s super weird. Not the fashionable giraffe part, the other part. The seeing part. Surely there aren’t tiny giraffes chilling in your mind, so what are you actually seeing? And why does it all look just a little bit “off,” if that is even the right word. Imagery just seems different from perception in some way, and it’s difficult to say what that way is. Vividness appears to play a role in this (e.g., Kind, 2017), but what even is vividness? In many respects I think vividness is kind of like knowledge: we know it when we see it, but it’s a nightmare to define. So let’s take a swing at it and see what happens to fall out.
Read MoreA conference report by Serena Gregorio
It is a truism in our everyday thinking that interpersonal understanding is valuable. But what does it mean, exactly, to understand someone? This question drove the workshop “Can you imagine?!” The Role of Imagination in Understanding Others, held on September 26th and 27th, 2023 at the Justus Liebig Universität Giessen, as part of the DFG-funded research project Geist und Imagination. The guiding assumption was twofold: Understanding someone cannot be reduced to, nor exhaustively explained by, acquiring propositional knowledge of their mental states and rationalizing explanations of their actions in terms of causes. Simultaneously, the act of imaginatively re-enacting another person's perspective in a phenomenally rich way seems to be a promising approach to making sense of at least some cases of other-directed understanding. I’ll briefly summarize the talks by highlighting three main themes that emerged.
Read MoreA post by Nadine Dijkstra
Did you really just see something appear in the corner of your eye or was it just your imagination? For most of us, the difference between what we imagine and what we see seems very clear. However, the more we learn about the neuroscience of imagination, the more puzzling it is that we don’t confuse our internally generated experiences with reality more often.
Over the last decades, the development of neuroimaging methods suitable for use in humans - such as functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) and magneto- and electroencephalography (M/EEG) – have made it possible to actually look into people’s heads while they are imagining. This research has revealed that when we imagine something, many of the same brain areas get activated as when we perceive that same thing.
For example, when we imagine the face of a loved one, the same parts of the high-level fusiform gyrus – a brain area located in the lower lobe of the cortex, sitting close to ear level in the skull – become activated as when we would actually see that person in real life (Ishai, 2002; Ishai et al., 2000). Similarly, when we imagine alternating black and white lines of a certain orientation (i.e. ‘a grating stimulus’, the classical image used in visual neuroscience research), the low-level primary visual cortex (V1) – the neural entry point for signals coming from the eyes, located all the way at the back of the brain – becomes activated in a similar way as when we would actually see those same lines (Albers et al., 2013; Harrison & Tong, 2009; Rademaker et al., 2019). Dozens of neuroimaging studies have shown neural overlap between imagined and perceived stimuli of all kinds, from simple shapes and lines to objects to full scenes (for reviews, see Dijkstra et al., 2019; Pearson, 2019). This poses a fundamental question: given that the brain signals of imagery and perception are similar, how are we able to keep apart imagination and reality?
Read MoreA post by Clas Weber
Imagine that not just the words you are reading right now on your screen are generated by a computer, but that everything you see, hear, smell, and feel is part of a hyper-detailed simulation created by a giant supercomputer. More shockingly, imagine that the stream of consciousness you are experiencing right now is itself generated by that computer. You yourself are part of the simulation.
Next, imagine that you wake up one morning and find yourself lying on an armour-like back. When you lift your head, you can see your brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. Your many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of you, wave about helplessly, as you think: I have been transformed into a giant Kafkaesque beetle.
Finally, imagine that you are Napoleon riding a horse, looking out on the battlefield at Austerlitz, surveying your troops. You feel confident that you will win the imminent battle. In the next moment, you find yourself standing over Donald Trump, and next to Theresa May, Shinzo Abe, Emmanuel Macron, and other heads of states. You are no longer Napoleon. Now you are Angela Merkel, negotiating with other world leaders during a G7 meeting.
These prompts elicit a special form of imagination where we picture a scenario from the first-person perspective or from the inside. We simulate what it would feel like to be the subject at the centre of the scenario. They also show how flexible this form of imagination is: we can, it seems, imagine being avatars in a computer simulation, being members of a different species, or even being two different people successively.
Read MoreA post by Mathilde Cappelli
It is a striking fact that, while much work has been devoted to the nature, norms, and value of imagination, fantasy has received scarce attention. This may partly be because fantasy is often conceived of as a mere subcategory of imagination, from which not much can be learned (Cherry, 1985; Kershnar, 2005; Smuts, 2016). But inquiring into the nature, norms, and value of fantasy can shed light on many interrelated issues, from the nature of desire to that of pleasure and imagination. In this post, I will present some thoughts on the nature and value of fantasy.
Read MoreA post by Anežka Kuzmičová
This is a research story, or the beginning of one, from a field other than most of the Junkyard. The field is literacy research – if we define literacy broadly enough. In the centre of this field is children’s imagining with varied texts and other stimuli (videos, spoken words, material objects), but studied differently from how it is studied in experimental research. My cross-disciplinary research group and I invite children to introspect, in the first person and their own words, rather than perform controlled tasks. The children’s introspection is supported with specially designed tangible props – picture cards, toys, colour-coded cutouts but also books. The idea behind such work is to deepen general understanding of children’s everyday experiences. We point out preexisting differences and groupings among children who otherwise tend to be treated as an experientially homogeneous population. We also revisit biases in the discourse and practice that affect children’s lives. One such bias is the general neglect of nonfiction as a springboard for imaginative activity, and the perception of young nonfiction readers as unimaginative individuals (Mar et al., 2006) or even non-readers (Mackey, 2020).
Read MoreA post by Silvana Pani
“First thing to do is in your mind create a very simple, literal freehand sketch or drawing. [...] Choose a beginning on that sketch and then describe it physically or draw it – the whole thing rather than just an element of the whole thing.”
-- Wayne McGregor, choreographer
Choreography is one of the best examples of the hurdles and miracles of trying to put a plan into action. Over and above being a usually cooperative practice, choreography requires skilled coordination of verbal instructions with sensorimotor information. Verbal instructions are one main vehicle of the choreographer’s intentions and one way for dancers to think about movements. Sensorimotor information, on the other hand, is what verbal instructions are translated into and constrained by before and during movement performance.
From deliberation to actual enactment, the nature of thought processes underlying both skilled and ordinary bodily movements (like picking up a cup) is far from clear. Philosophers have often conceived of intentions as building blocks of plans. Our planning activity is thus responsible for deliberation and practical reasoning as well as for the preliminary rehearsal of actions (not all rehearsal of action happens at the planning level, though).
The idea that intentions are propositional states figuring in practical reasoning is a traditional platitude (e.g. Bratman 1987). The idea that motor representations, qua immediate antecedents of actions, are non-propositional in nature is a more recent view and quite widely accepted (e.g. Jeannerod 2006). The question of how differently formatted contents, that is, contents that are propositionally and motorically formatted come together towards the realization of some action goal or set of goals, such as a new choreographic work, has been dubbed the “Interface challenge” by Butterfill and Sinigaglia (2014).
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