Arnon Levy is associate professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research is primarily within the philosophy of science. Among other topics, he has written on the role of the imagination and fiction in connection with scientific modeling. Together with Peter Godfrey-Smith, he has recently edited the collection: “The Scientific Imagination: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives” (Oxford University Press, 2020).
A post by Arnon Levy and Ori Kinberg
Can we know facts about the concrete, physical world, solely by using our imagination? Recently, certain philosophers – among them the editor-in-chief of this blog (Kind 2016, 2018) – have forcefully argued for an affirmative answer. While some debates about knowledge-via-the-imagination concern regimented uses of the imagination pertaining to higher forms of knowledge (such as thought experiments in scientific and philosophical contexts), and others concern the benefits of unbridled exploration of fictional realms, these authors suggest that the imagination supplies us with something else: neither scientific-philosophical knowledge nor “knowledge of the deep, elusive sort that we may hope to gain from great works of fiction, but knowledge of far more mundane, widespread matters of immediate practical relevance” (Williamson 2016, 113).
Ori Kinberg holds a B.A. in philosophy and Hebrew Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is currently studying for a master's degree in Hebrew literature, also at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. When he is not deciphering cryptic medieval manuscripts, he teaches literary theory and pursues interests in epistemology and aesthetics.
We understand these arguments as aiming for a fairly strong claim: it is not merely that the imagination can be a vehicle for knowledge. Rather, it is argued that (under certain conditions, at least, of which more anon) the fact that a belief p was produced via the imagination constitutes a reason to accept p. We take it that this is what Amy Kind, for instance, has in mind when she says that “imaginative exercises have... justificatory power in their own right” or when she speaks of the “imagination qua imagination [playing] a justificatory role” (2018, 231). As far as we can see, there are two principal routes to this claim. We will suggest that both fall short.
The first route is to argue that the imagination is reliable. (This may take one only part of the way, inasmuch as one thinks that reliability is necessary but not sufficient for knowledge. But since we view this sort of argument as unsuccessful, we won’t worry about that). The second route is to argue for some picture of how the imagination works, epistemically speaking, such that it supplies imaginers with knowledge. To highlight the contrast, we’ll call the first of these a black box reliability argument and the second a mechanistic argument.
The simplest form of a black box reliability argument proceeds from evidence pertaining to real-world people. Such evidence would show that a substantial range of persons, under a significant range of conditions, come to know mundane, concrete, “regular” facts by using their imaginations. Timothy Williamson, for one, seems to take this by and large for granted. Amy Kind, for another, points to “extraordinary imaginers” – Nikola Tesla and Temple Grandin are her prime exemplars— to show that knowledge via the imagination is possible. Having looked into these cases in some detail, we are not so sure they shore up Kind's optimistic conclusions, but we will set this aside, for brevity's sake. A more general, and more serious, concern for a simple black box reliability argument is that it conflicts with a highly relevant body of empirical work in psychology, concerning so-called naïve physics (Kubricht et al. 2017). This body of research shows that people are rather poor at using their imaginations to figure out what will happen in a fairly broad range of simple physical scenarios – the direction in which an object will fall, whether tilting a vessel containing water will cause it to spill, etc. On the face of it, these are exactly the kinds of uses of the imagination that would give us “knowledge of mundane, widespread matters of immediate practical relevance”; But, very often, they don’t. This conflicts with claims like Williamson's, on which most (and not only extraordinary) people's daily imaginings are reliable.
An indirect, yet perhaps more general, black box reliability argument appeals to evolutionary considerations. Williamson, in the paper we quoted from above, argues in this vein. He suggests that the imagination’s primary (selected) function is to supply us with knowledge that would make a difference to our survival and reproduction. We think there are several reasons to reject this speculation. But we highlight one: an evolutionary mechanism need not be reliable in order to serve an organism’s epistemic-cum-selective needs. This will hold when the relative costs of false negatives or of false positives are very high. For instance, many organisms have overly-sensitive danger detection mechanisms (an example Williamson uses, too). They flee at the sound of a rustle in a nearby bush. This is because even if in the majority of cases the organism flees unnecessarily, that is a price worth paying, when the alternative is succumbing to a lurking predator. If the selection pressures under which our imagination evolved were of this “risk-averse” nature, then we should not expect it to be reliable in an epistemically relevant sense.
A mechanistic argument for imaginative knowledge proceeds by spelling out principles, or constraints, such that if the imagination operates according to them then it produces knowledge. Two forms of constraint are usually deemed necessary: first, we need to craft our imaginary setup so as to reflect reality accurately. (Williamson speaks of forcing "the initial conditions" of an imaginative exercise [2016, 116]; Kind mentions a "Reality constraint" [2016, 150]). Second, the exercise should unfold in a way that mimics real-world occurrences (Kind calls this the “Change constraint”; see also Balcerak-Jackson, 50-51). Here ‘reality’ and ‘change’ do not name specific principles but function as labels for the sorts of conditions that would be required: one must start from a factual basis and proceed in a manner that tracks how a real-world analogue would unfold. Neither Williamson and Kind, nor other authors we are familiar with, spell out these required sub-principles – presumably because they are too numerous, or too context-dependent. That said, the overall idea is clear: the imagination can lead to knowledge inasmuch as it’s truth preserving: if it proceeds from reality-based initial conditions according to realistic principles, then it will arrive at true outputs.
We do not object to the idea that following such a procedure can lead to knowledge. What we object to is the idea that this gives us knowledge from the imagination, in the relevant sense. For, if the principles underlying our imaginative exercise are followed explicitly (and, we suppose, intentionally) then we seem to have good-old-fashioned inferential reasoning. Otherwise, we seem to be back in black box argument territory. In effect, we are suggesting a dilemma. Its second horn, the black box option, should be clear by now. But let us expand somewhat on the first.
If our putative imaginative knowledge is due to our following appropriate principles (or constraints) of reasoning, then it seems that they are warranted inasmuch as the underlying principles are sound and are correctly applied. (Nikola Tesla, at several points in his autobiography, describes his use of the imagination as operating in this way whenever successful, and ascribed failures to a lack of sufficient theoretical background). But while this may well lead to knowledge – assuming the correct principles are properly applied – why think of this as a special, imagination-based, form of knowledge? No doubt the inferences are performed in the imagination. But this does not seem to be enough: just as we do not speak of "knowledge via paper" when we calculate with a pencil and paper, or of “knowledge via blackboard” when our instruments consist of a chalk and a blackboard, so the fact that an inference was done in the imagination does not seem to license talk of it as a special form of justification. The imagination may, perhaps, be causally essential to a specific imaginer's successes. But from an epistemic standpoint her success is attributable to the proper application of appropriate principles of inference. All the while, if it is not appropriate principles we are following, the reality and change constraints remain mysterious. Thus, either the mechanistic route leads to a view in which imaginative knowledge seems unremarkable, or else it collapses into the black box route.
Where does this leave us? One option is to try and go on assessing the imagination’s reliability in particular domains, in the manner of the work on naïve physics we discussed above. Another option is to forget about the idea that the imagination provides a sui generis avenue for attaining knowledge, attempting instead to locate for it a different kind of epistemic contribution, for instance its role in eliminative inferences. Both are promising directions, in our view. But they will have to wait for another blogpost.
Bibliography
Balcerak-Jackson, Magdalena. “On the Epistemic Value of Imagining, Supposing, and Conceiving.” In Knowledge Through Imagination, edited by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 41–60. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Kind, Amy. “How Imagination Gives Rise to Knowledge.” In Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory, edited by Fiona Macpherson and Fabian Dorsch, 227–46. Oxford University Press, 2018.
———. “Imagining Under Constraints.” In Knowledge Through Imagination, edited by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 145–59. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Kubricht, James R., Keith J. Holyoak, and Hongjing Lu. “Intuitive Physics: Current Research and Controversies.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21, no. 10 (October 1, 2017): 749–59.
Williamson, Timothy. “Knowing by Imagining.” In Knowledge Through Imagination, edited by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 113–23. Oxford University Press, 2016.
———. The Philosophy of Philosophy. Blackwell/Brown Lectures in Philosophy 2. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.