A post by Megha Devraj
Content warning: mentions of sexual assault, descriptions of violence, mention of a gendered slur.
In 2004, in the Northeast Indian border state of Manipur, a group of middle-aged women collected to express their outrage at a gruesome incident of murder and sexual assault by members of an Indian paramilitary unit. They stripped all their clothing off their bodies and began to weep. A now famous photograph of the event shows them standing together in a row, completely nude, their bodies obscured by a large banner written in lettering designed to look like it was dripping blood: ‘Indian Army Rape Us’.
What made these women choose to speak against sexual violence by putting their own naked bodies on public display? Why not use a more comfortable means to voice dissent? It seems that there was something about their spectacular display of vulnerability that was able to jolt its audience into experiencing the oppressive force of the violence that Manipuri women are subject to. The scene of the protest was a profoundly moving one. Many of those present, including police personnel, cried upon looking at the women’s lament. Sentries who had initially pointed guns at the women withdrew their weapons, presumably because they too felt sorrowful or ashamed. Baring themselves allowed the women to convey their feelings of being violated in a way that descriptive speech likely could not. Their protest asked the Indian public to reimagine violence against women not as a regrettable consequence of national security, but as a cause of irreconcilable grief and anger.
My work focusses on a communicative device with special connections to imagination and creativity: spectacle. I think of a spectacle roughly as a communicative act that involves intentionally using the social significance of objects and spaces to a striking effect. Spectacles are present in protests and performance art, in parades and pageants, in public displays of national or military glory, and even in some cases of interpersonal communication. Here, I discuss spectacles that evoke painful emotions and how women use them as a response to sexual violence.
Read MoreThe Junkyard will take its usual summer break. We will return with regular posts in late August. Feel free to reach out with ideas for future posts. We wish you all a refreshing and productive summer. Happy Summering and Happy Imagining!
Read MoreA post by Michael T. Stuart
Yes, obviously. Some algorithms already do, or soon will. No, of course it can’t, don’t be silly, though it might be good to pretend it does. Who cares?
Let’s go through these different attitudes to the question one by one. In the end, I’ll suggest what I think is a better attitude.
Read MoreA post by Julia Langkau
We all seem to agree that intuitively, there is a strong link between fiction and imagination. Beginning with Walton's influential account of make-believe, imagining has been seen as the operative attitude when it comes to fiction as opposed to believing: "Imagining aims at the fictional as belief aims at the true." (Walton 1990: 41). This mutually exclusive distinction between imagining and believing has shaped much of the discussion about our engagement with fiction, such as the definition of the relevant kind of imagination, patchwork puzzles, etc. The claim, as I understand it, has been a normative one (see Balcerak Jackson & Langkau 2022) — after all, Walton talks in terms of what fiction prescribes. Even if it turned out that most people actually believed most fictions while reading – perhaps before realizing they were fictions and then disbelieving them – they would all be making a mistake: they should have imagined instead.
Read MoreA post by Claire Anscomb
Recent advances in AI image generation have been said to assist the imaginative and creative powers of human users. As artist Sarah Meyohas has enthused, algorithmic models, like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), can generate “images one couldn’t have imagined” (quoted in Ploin et al. 2022, 42). Broadly speaking, GAN-style models, which date back to 2014, are trained on images, which may be pre-curated or assembled by the user themselves, to generate visual outputs that come from the same distribution as the training set (Elgammal et al. 2017, 5). Since the early 2020s, with the development of Text-to-Image (TTI) systems such as DALL-E and Midjourney, users can generate images to visualise their ideas based on just a text prompt. Although this may aid a user who is unable to imagine how an image corresponding to their prompt could look, this doesn’t necessarily implicate or facilitate their creativity to produce novel and valuable work.
Some users may, without much thought for which TTI system they are using, supply a simple prompt and, due to the sophistication of these systems, generate impressively realistic or stylistic images. However, in such cases, the user has likely not contributed very much to shaping the features of the images. Moreover, the results of TTI systems can be quite repetitive, which is an inherent part of the design – they have been created so that they produce new images in the likeness of those that already exist. But these are not all images, they are just the images that are in the training data. Notably, this training data typically consists of billions of pairings of text and images scraped from the internet (Heaven 2022). Although generative AI systems can represent non-existent and existing subjects alike, they struggle if something is rare or missing from the training data. The biases and noise of these systems may then “dominate our own imagination” (Manovich 2023, 17). So, what prospects are there for using generative AI systems as imaginative aids in creative undertakings?
Read MoreA post by Giulia Lorenzi
What does music have to do with imagination? At a first glance, it may appear that music does not have much to do with imagination and imagining. After all, when we are presented with a musical piece, we encounter a complex perceptual entity constructed and structured in a certain way, implying (often) specific types of sounds, and motivated by artistic and intellectual expressive reasons. So, it may seem that not much is left to imagining once perceptual entities, structure, intentions, and goals of an artistic expression are set. The creator (whether a composer or a performer-composer) can appear prima facie to have decided everything that could appear in a piece leaving no room for anything else.
In this short piece, I want to explore places in which imagination may play a role in enjoying, perceiving, and producing music. Far from aiming to be an exhaustive treatment of where and how imagination could be at play in the musical realm, this piece aims to reflect on where philosophical studies of imagination may be enlightening for philosophical research on music.
Read MoreA post by Margrethe Bruun Vaage
Trigger warning: rape in the context of rape-revenge films
I keep thinking that my next project should surely be about something nice. But in my research I keep being drawn to some of the darkest corners of film and television fiction. In philosophy there have been discussions about imaginative resistance, and how there are limits to what we are willing or able to imagine (see e.g., Gendler and Liao 2016 for an overview). It is not my aim here to revisit these debates, but rather to report from what is going on at the other side of town, so to say: as a film theorist it seems to me that there are many ways that fiction can and does invite engagement that breaks with our moral principles.
One such example is found in the antihero, who for some time has prevailed in television series, particularly in the US, but also in many other national contexts following the huge success of series such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. The most typical spectator response seems to have been to root for main characters such as Tony Soprano and Walter White, but they are in fact people we would be loathe to support in reality.
Another example of engagement that we might not fully condone is found in the central role played by harsh punishment in fiction. Media psychologist Arthur Raney points out that spectators of crime fiction, for example, “might tend to expect and demand (for the sake of enjoyment) a punishment that is greater than what is morally acceptable in reality; only such over-punishment will lead to enjoyment” (Raney 2005: 151). The proper villains getting their just desert at the end of a suspenseful story is a mainstay in fiction, sometimes sidestepping the law in vigilante stories such as the Dirty Harry films, for example. And it can be remarkably pleasurable to watch punishment in fiction, even for those among us who are decidedly against harsh punishment in real life: I for one am against any kind of capital punishment, and firmly believe in reform rather than prison as punishment. However, put on a Dirty Harry film, and I’ll gleefully enjoy watching those punks get lectured on the .44 Magnum.
Read MoreA post by Zorana Ivcevic Pringle
I do not remember when the word “creativity” entered my vocabulary. Growing up in 1980s Eastern Europe, it was not at the forefront of discussions in education or culture beyond the world of art. But my favorite cartoon was about Professor Balthazar, an inventor who creates whimsical solutions to problems brought to him by the citizens of his town. He would listen to their stories, learn about trouble they were facing, and start to think. Professor Balthazar would pace up and down, looking serious. Then, all at once, he would jump with joy of discovery, run into a room with a giant colorful contraption, turn on a faucet, and out of a drop, a fully-formed invention would materialize. My question kept being – But how?
Read MoreA post by Kevin Lande
Images occupy a peculiar position in our understanding of representation—the capacity of one thing to be about another. On the one hand, the image is the paragon of representation. An image of a hand re-presents its subject matter, whereas the linguistic phrase “right hand” bears a more abstract, arbitrary relation to what it signifies. Images can teem with seemingly inexhaustible significance—depicting, for example, not just a hand, but a certain number of figures in a certain arrangement—while symbols of language tend to have a lean, almost brutal semantic economy.
On the other hand, images are commonly also taken to be rudimentary and lacking for any definite structure or meaning. Language, by contrast, is the “infinite gift” (Yang, 2006), allowing for unbounded creativity in thought and communication. That gift is fueled by a lexicon of basic words or symbols. The lexicon feeds a grammatical engine, comprising rules for how those words can be combined to generate novel meaningful phrases. Looking beyond language, Roland Barthes (1977) asked: “can analogical representation (the ‘copy’) produce true systems of signs and not merely simple agglutinations of symbols?” Barthes observed that the image, in contrast to language, “is felt to be weak.” “Pictures… have no grammatical rules,” writes Flint Schier (1986). Even the book Visual Grammar (Leborg, 2006) begins by noting that “Visual language has no formal syntax or semantics.” The grammar of a language explains its expressive power. The object of Leborg’s “grammar” is not to explain, but to describe, to classify, and to recommend (see also Hopkins, 2023). Language has an engine; images have only a dashboard.
Read MoreA post by Stephen Asma
Imagination is finally getting some love from philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists.
My own work has been a tiny contribution to the resurgence of imagination studies, especially in the interface between neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and evolution (Asma, 2017). This essay, however, is not about respectable imagination studies. No, this is about the weird stuff –the eccentric history and philosophy of imagination.
None of what follows will get you tenure, or an invitation to speak somewhere prestigious. It will not gain you influential friends, and it might even prevent you from getting a date. But it needs to be aired, contemplated, and even celebrated. As cognitively fluid systems (like imagination, or language) expand into ecological niches, they themselves “play” and “experiment” and sometimes become adaptations, or exaptations, or spandrels, or deleterious dead ends. Theories are like this too. To my mind, not all the weird theories of imagination presented below are dead ends, and some may yet prove valuable –even if we’re not sure how.
Read MoreA post by Corey S. Pressman
How might we arrive at a distinctive definition of the human animal? Taxonomy leaves little on the table. Clearly, it is not our spines, hands, bipedalism, or brainstems that define us. In the end, what puts the sapiens in Homo sapiens is essentially cortical. Our species benefits from a variety of neurological novelties such as phonemic speech, self awareness, and neuroplasticity.
And also this about the human brain: imagination lives here. Like so many other taxonomic gifts, imagination itself is ancient. But while other species may have rudimentary forms of imagination, human imagination gets up to all kinds of species-specific shenanigans. Culture, science, art, stories, selves: all of these belong to the human imagination, as does anxiety, society, and the cultural habits that contribute to climatic and economic dissonance.
However, the soaring possibilities offered by human imagination are balanced by another amazing neurological feature: automaticity. Automaticity refers to the process by which certain tasks or behaviors become so well-learned and practiced that they can be performed without conscious effort or attention. In the context of the brain and behavior, automaticity refers to the ability to carry out tasks efficiently and effectively with minimal conscious awareness or cognitive resources. When a behavior becomes automatic, it is executed quickly and effortlessly, often without the need for deliberate decision-making or conscious monitoring. This phenomenon is facilitated by the brain's ability to form neural pathways and consolidate learning through repetition and practice.
Read MoreA post by Peter Kung and Shawn Klein
Peter is a lifelong Eagles fan. Shawn is a diehard Patriots fan. We separately watched Super Bowl LII and, to put it mildly, felt wild swings of emotion. But…why? It was only a game. Why do sports fans sometimes (often?) go crazy at sporting events and then afterwards go about their day as if nothing much happened. If something of genuine significance happened, something that warranted the emotional ups and downs the fan experienced during the game, why don’t its effects linger?
Walton (2015) thinks this puzzle of sports fandom parallels the paradox of fiction.
“The fan imagines that the outcome matters immensely and imagines caring immensely—while (in many cases) realizing that it doesn’t actually matter much, if at all. She is caught up in the world of the game, as the spectator at the theater is caught up in the story. Afterwards, like the playgoer, she steps outside of the make-believe and goes back to living her life as though nothing much had happened—even if the home team suffered a devastating and humiliating defeat. It’s just a story; it’s just a game” (p. 77).
Walton himself and other authors (Wildman 2019, Moore 2019) who have tried to explain this aspect of sports fandom have applied Walton’s theory in a quite limited way. These three Waltonians have an impoverished view of sports make-believe and sports fandom. There’s a better way to apply the Waltonian theory to sports.
Read MoreA post by Anatolii Kozlov
“There is something hinky in the local junkyard.” – What is it? What? A strange phrase evokes a sense of intrigue and anticipation. As if indeed there’s a fuzzy pile of rusty junk at a distance, and something – or someone – is about to spring out from the side of it. Will it? I scroll further through the list of writing prompts:
“Someone has a much-needed conversation with an A.I.”
“A garden statue comes to life.”
“An artist cannot finish their masterpiece.”
“A pet whose owner treats them like a human child.”
These are startling, amusing, evocative prompts, very different from the ones found in a philosopher’s paper on imagination. “Imagine there is a horse”. “Imagine a flying horse”. “Imagine a purple horse”. Suppose I did. So what? What did I learn in this less-than-miniscule moment of imagining? At the same time, what hides behind the other strings of words that makes them so appealing to engage with and start imagining? This is not to say that the classification of imagination through ordinary language is somehow philosophically idle. Still, something valuable seems to be lost if a philosopher’s exercise in imagination ends right there.
Read MoreA post by Christopher Bartel
When children play with toys, imagination is put to a distinctive and familiar use, which we might call projective imagining. This is a use of imagination that adults don’t have many opportunities to employ. However, a recent trend in video gaming offers one. Here is an example.
Stardew Valley is a video game released in 2016. Gamers describe it as a farming simulator. In the game, the player inherits an old farm from their grandfather. The farm has fallen into poor shape. The player’s job is to make the farm profitable again, which would make the ghost of their grandfather very proud. The player can also explore the nearby village, interact with the villagers, and develop relationships with the villagers by giving them gifts and doing favors for them. While the primary activity of the game is caring for the farm—tilling the soil, planting crops, harvesting them—a significant portion of the player’s time can be taken up by developing relationships with the villagers. Players can date some characters, marry them, and have children. The game is as much a soap opera as it is a farming simulator.
Read MoreA post by Felipe Morales Carbonell
I want to consider the following idea: sometimes it happens that after becoming acquainted with a topic, one becomes less able to imagine certain things about it. What could this really mean? How could this happen, and why? Here some thoughts:
One possibility is that what one once imagined as possible (and thus judged as imaginable) was then judged to be impossible. A novice in woodworking might have a mistaken idea of what procedures can be done to achieve certain results, just because they do not know any better, and imagine themselves achieving those results by performing these mistaken procedures. Having learned that those procedures are faulty, they will not attempt to imagine themselves trying to achieve those results by imagining themselves following those procedures (this is all separate from the question of whether they can learn the right procedures).
Would we say that in this case the subject has lost the ability to imagine x? I think it is probably more natural to say that they were mistaken about their abilities. They could imagine something that wasn’t what they thought they could imagine, so they were able to imagine something. But they were unable to imagine what they thought they had imagined, and they came to discover their inability.
Read MoreA post by Stephen Müller
The realm of sensory imagination is a place where dragons soar and unicorns prance, highlighting a pivotal feature of mental imagery: it can represent things that do not exist. This fact is broadly recognized yet seldom examined in the face of the substantial challenges it presents to standard theories of representation, such as informational and teleosemantic frameworks. These frameworks hinge on the notion that a sequence of physical events—like light reflecting off an apple and being processed by our visual system—culminates in the mental representation of the apple (e.g., Pylyshyn, 2007; Recanati, 2012; Neander, 2017)[1]. Hence, these theories do not easily extend to the representation of non-existent entities, where no light from fictitious creatures reaches our eyes.
Adopting a positivist perspective, one might question what it even means for mental images to represent non-existent entities. It verges on the Meinongian to propose that "there are objects of mental imagery about which it is true that there are no such objects" (compare Meinong, 1904 / 1960). Thus, it falls upon philosophers to navigate these tricky waters carefully, ensuring that our explanations do not introduce bizarre ontologies or outright contradictions. This brings us to the core question I wish to delve into: What kinds of objects do our mental images represent, and by what process do they come to represent them?
Read MoreA post by Andrea Rivadulla Duró
We spend a fair amount of time imagining experiences and do so nonchalantly. Take Mary, for example, who works as a security guard in a government building where the hours stretch long and monotonous. As she stands immovable as a pin, she watches the day's traffic ebb and flow for eight hours a day. Her aspirations for a brighter future are dim, compelling her to retreat into imagination during working hours. In her daydream, she imagines herself as a pianist, hearing the resounding applause of an audience, feeling the weight of a trophy in her hands, and basking in the glow of faces of recognition.
It is well established that Mary’s imagining can evoke emotions akin to those experienced during actual events (Holmes & Matheus, 2010). As Mary imagines, she might momentarily feel joy. Nevertheless, setting aside these immediate emotional responses, imagining is typically considered harmless from a long-term perspective. Mary is aware that her imagined episode does not track changes in the world (i.e. it lacks world-sensitivity; Badura & Kind, 2021). Consequently, Mary will not attribute evidential value to the imagined, nor will she adjust her attitudes based on it.
In the philosophical literature, perception is characterized as having assertoric force: It inclines the perceiver to believe its content (Chasid & Weksler, 2020). In contrast, perceptual imagination is commonly taken to be non-assertoric: Imagining winning a piano contest does not incline the imaginer to believe they actually won.
Read MoreA post by Hannah Kim
I saw Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things over winter break, and I was impressed. The costumes, settings, and even castings (Mark Ruffalo!) felt original, and I had a hard time describing the work to others (“it’s a… Frankenstein-meets-Barbie-meets-Siddhartha in a twisted-Wes-Anderson-meets-Salvador-Dali style”).
The ability to conjure up people, places, and events in a compelling manner is a real imaginative feat, and it’s common to think that fiction is more imaginative than nonfiction. This holds for both senses of the word ‘imaginative’: producing a work of fiction seems to require more creativity (the ability to come up with something novel and meritorious), at least when it comes to content generation. Creating fiction also seems to involve more use of imagination—there’s a sense in which we don’t want non-fiction creation to involve imagination!
In fact, what’s been dubbed the “consensus view” of fiction closely connects fiction to imagination and defines fiction as works where the creator intends for the audience to imagine, and not believe, its contents. Stacie Friend (2012) and Derek Matravers (2014) question this close connection between fiction and imagination, arguing that any representational works, including nonfiction, invite the consumers to imagine their content.
Read MoreA post by Avshalom Schwartz
The current crisis of liberal democracy has brought with it growing concerns over the inability of citizens to agree on basic facts, beliefs, and views about the world. This issue, which is sometimes described as “deep disagreement” or “belief polarization” (cf. Suhay, Tenenbaum, and Bartola 2022; de Ridder 2021), poses a profound challenge to democratic politics. When citizens no longer share in these basic things—when they perceive the world in radically different ways—democratic politics become hard, if not impossible. As Muirhead and Rosenblum have recently put it, “without a shared understanding of what it means to know something and to hold a common account of the essential contours of political reality, collective political action is impossible. Common sense is the required touchstone of democratic public life, and it is under attack” (2019, 123).
Although these concerns have become increasingly salient in contemporary political discourse, they are far from new. Philosophers have been grappling with them since at least classical antiquity, often turning to the mental faculty of imagination in attempting to explain the psychological and epistemological underpinnings of this problem. For Plato—who offered one of the earliest theoretical accounts of this mental faculty—the divergence between how different individuals may perceive and experience the physical world has to do, in part, with how phantoms and images (phantasmata and eikones) operate on the imagination (phantasia or eikasia) (cf. Resp., 510d–11). Similarly, Aristotle held that the variance between different individuals’ perceptions and misperceptions of the world might be due to their imagination. Unlike ‘proper sensation’ or reason, our imagination (phantasia) could be right or wrong, a fact reflected in the role it plays in dreams, hallucinations, and errors more generally (DA, 428a6-20).
Read MoreA post by Isabelle Wentworth
The capacity for creativity has long been used to index humanity—it’s part of what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. This logic—like all forms of categorisation—has both inclusionary and exclusionary force. We’ve seen it finance archaeological explorations for Hominid art, and also become instrument of oppression and empire—recall Thomas Jefferson’s justification for the expulsion of emancipated slaves from the United States, as “among the blacks there is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.” (1781)
AI creativity is looking to challenge this logic. We’ve had some fears about what artificial creativity means for us in the past—bolstered by AI story-grammar storytelling models in the early 2000s—but they have taken on new urgency since the creation of AI which can not only analyse data but learn its underlying patterns to generate original material.
Of course, it’s important to know whether AI is genuinely creative, or whether its output just mimics creativity. That answer will depend on what theory of creativity we decide to use, but before we can make that decision it’s important to ensure we’ve addressed all the factors of ‘creativity’ in the first place. Here we might look to Mel Rhodes’ conceptual model of the dimensions of creativity. In this model, we have product (that is, the actual creative output, such as the text or artwork); the person (the creator of the art); and the process (Rhodes, 1961).
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