Wolfgang Huemer teaches philosophy at the University of Parma. His research focuses mainly on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of literature.
A post by Irene Binini, Wolfgang Huemer and Daniele Molinari
Imagination is ubiquitous and plays a central role in the most diverse contexts; we can wonder “what would really happen if…”, or “what would I actually feel in such a situation…” as well as imagine the most bizarre, dramatic or funny events just for entertainment, to express ourselves or to develop emotional bonds. No matter how you slice it – imagination is not just one thing. It is, rather, a heterogenous family of activities that serve different purposes (Kind 2013). These activities have in common that they seem to be free, unlimited and fancy. When it comes to assuming an epistemic role, however, as it is the case in thought experiments, imagination needs, according to a widely held view, to remain within certain boundaries, and to have some kind of “anchoring” in reality and its most basic principles. Yet, thought experiments are fictional narratives that prescribe imagining counterfactual (or even counterpossible) scenarios. This raises the question of whether and how their cognitive value depends on constraints that guarantee the significance of fictional scenarios for the real world.
Irene Binini is a researcher in the history of logic, with a special interest in ancient and medieval modal logic. Currently, she is a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow, conducting a project devoted to imagining the impossible and thought experiments in Late medieval philosophy, carried out at the University of Parma in collaboration with the University of Toronto.
This issue has been acknowledged in recent literature. Positing constraints on epistemic uses of imagination would allow us to establish external criteria to determine whether we have successfully used imagination to advance our cognitive horizons. This is not a straightforward task, though. Michael Stuart (2020) has argued that there is no single type of constraint at work in scientific imagination and that some thought experiments have been successful precisely in virtue of their violating relevant constraints. For him, scientific imagination is epistemically relevant not primarily in virtue of its being constrained, but rather because it is “productively anarchic”. This indicates that not only imagination, but also the constraints that are imposed on it, are heterogenous.
We suggest that the debate on constraints in epistemic uses of imagination can be enriched if we take a step back and return to a more fundamental question: why thought experiments? What are the reasons that prompt us to engage in this kind of imaginative activity? Our central claim is that one of the most important reasons why we conduct thought experiments is that they provide powerful tools to philosophers and scientists for sharing their perspectives on reality, theories, words, etc, with others.
Daniele Molinari is a PhD student at the University of Parma. He is working on the social dimension of imagination, focusing on thought experiments as fictional narratives prompting games of make-believe.
Perspectives in Scientific Representations
To fully appreciate the role of perspective in thought experiments, we think it is helpful to follow Bas Van Fraassen’s (2008) lead and understand the term “perspective” in light of the introduction of linear perspective in the Renaissance, that is, in a period that was marked by the emergence of a new technique that allowed painters to represent space and spatial depth. At this time, artists succeeded in going beyond the perspectival representation of singular objects and could faithfully represent three-dimensional ones as well as their spatial relations to objects in their neighbourhood on a bi-dimensional plane (cf. Panofsky 1991). While in a first moment the progress might have consisted in the artistic skill developed by individual painters, like Brunelleschi, it is important to note that the decisive breakthrough was achieved in the moment when this skill could be formalised and turned into a (mathematically informed) technique. Several painters – think of Leon Battista Alberti, Piero della Francesca or Albrecht Dürer[1] – have, in a second moment, described this technique with rules and principles that allowed them to pass it on to others and to teach it in an explicit manner. In their treatises, they insist that theirs is a mathematical or geometrical method, which could be learnt by interiorising the relevant rules or principles.
We thus understand perspective as a technique or procedure to produce representations of objects in their relation to others, a technique that can be communicated on the basis of intersubjective rules and principles. Perspective is, as Van Fraassen suggests, a cluster concept; its central characteristics are distortion, occlusion, texture-fading, etc. – aspects that become manifest in the way the target objects or phenomena are represented. Moreover, next to these aspects, that pertain to the content of representation, perspective also comprises aspects that depend on the relation between this content and the person who endorses the perspective. This relation can be expressed, according to Van Fraassen, with indexical statements like: ‘this is how things look to me from here’ (2008: 59). As we hope our short discussion suggests, there are strong parallels between artistic and scientific representations. Both are results of (rule-guided) techniques, procedures or methods that can be taught and acquired, and both highlight some aspects of reality and occlude, distort or neglect others. For these reasons, philosophers like Ronald Giere, Bas Van Fraassen and others insist that scientific representations are perspectival. Moreover, they also highlight the pragmatic dimension of scientific representations, insisting that science is an activity and that we use theories and representations for practical purposes.
Perspectives at Play in Thought Experiments
In thought experiments, the perspectival elements that are generally present in scientific representations play a prominent role. Thought experiments are particularly powerful devices when it comes to displaying a theoretical perspective. They guide the readers’ attention to the basic choices that shape the perspective and determine which elements will be salient and which might be distorted or occluded. Moreover, they highlight the theory’s explanatory aims and its epistemic purposes. As we know, one and the same phenomenon can be represented from different theoretical perspectives. Think about love: A neuropsychiatrist, an evolutionary biologist or a philosopher would capture this phenomenon in different terms. If one of them would like to share her own perspective with others, she could try to devise a thought experiment that describes a familiar (yet fictional) scenario in terms of the theory she endorses. She would, thus, put the theory “at work”. The others, if they make the effort to imagine the scenario in the terms proposed, will get a better hold on how the respective theory works, and on the methods and procedures it uses to produce scientific representations. They do so by getting a better understanding of “what things look like” for the designer of the fictional scenario.
Thought experiments, thus, are good at illustrating theoretical perspectives. But aren’t there other devices that could do the same job? It could be argued that arguments or case studies can be used for the same purpose – and that they do so by making the involved inferential patterns explicit and without recurring to fiction. We do think, however, that thought experiments are better when it comes to highlighting and sharing a perspective. First, unlike arguments, they require the reader to participate in the imaginative project. This participation can come in different forms of imagination. In some cases, such as in Thomson’s “Dying Violinist” (1971: 48 f.), the reader is supposed to imagine the scenario from the inside, while in others, like in Einstein’s “Chasing the Light” (Norton 2013: 123), she is asked to engage in a form of perceptual imagination. Second, unlike case studies, thought experiments give the author full control over the design of the scenario and the elements involved, as they are not constrained to remain faithful to reality in each and every detail. Authors can profit from this narrative power in different ways: they can make thought experiments more compelling by designing idealised scenarios, or raise their rhetorical power by enriching the narrative with aesthetic details that assume an ornamental role, or more generally by displaying her own voice. The author’s full control and the reader’s active engagement are peculiar to thought experiments. Both characteristics contribute to making thought experiments most efficient tools for authors to display how certain phenomena look like from their theory and make it possible for the readers to confront – and eventually to “try on” – the proposed perspective. In other words, thought experiments are powerful devices to put perspectives into play.
Back to the Constraints on Imagination
Let us conclude by trying to honour the promise we made above, and come back to the question concerning the constraints on epistemic uses of imagination. In recent literature, several kinds of constraint have been identified with the purpose of explaining the epistemic value of imagination: logical constraints or constraints related to scientific modelling (Stuart 2020); reality and change constraints (Kind 2016); architectural, context-specific and epistemic constraints (Salis 2020), and others. If imagination plays a role in thought experiments (as we have taken for granted so far), these constraints on imagination may also have an impact on the success – or lack of success – of thought experiments. However, the discussion above unveils the need of a different form of constraint: to fully appreciate the epistemic value of thought experiments, we ought to pay attention to their capacity to illustrate and share a given perspective. Their success thus depends on their prompting a “game of perspectives”. This requires the reader to accept the invitation to actively participate in the imaginative project and to follow the path designed by the author – which, in parallel, requires the author to design the thought experiment in a way that allows the reader to relate and to overcome his potential resistance to play along. Only if these conditions are met is the reader able to “try on” the perspective offered and to evaluate its merits and flaws “from inside the theory”, as it were. This constraint has to do with the way in which we use imagination in the practice of thought experiments. It thus pertains to a new family of constraints, namely pragmatic constraints. These constraints need to be explored in more depth – which is what we plan to work on in the near future.
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All three authors are members of PRISMA (Parma Research Group on Imagination in the Philosophy of Science, Mind and Art
Notes
[1] For the historical details of the introduction of linear perspective, cf. Kemp (1992).
Reference
Kemp, M. (1992). The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Kind, A. (2013). “The Heterogeneity of the Imagination.” Erkenntnis 78, 141–159.
Kind, A. (2016). “Imagining under Constraints.” In Knowledge Through Imagination, ed. Kind, A. and Kung., P., 145–159. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Norton, J. D. (2013). “Chasing the Light. Einstein’s Most Famous Thought Experiment.” In Thought Experiments in Philosophy, Science and the Arts, ed. Frappier, M. Meynell, L. and Brown J. R., 123-140. New York: Routledge.
Panofsky, E. (1991). Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books.
Salis, F. (2020). “Learning Through the Scientific Imagination.” Argumenta 6(1), 65-80.
Stuart, M. T. (2020). “The Productive Anarchy of Scientific Imagination.” Philosophy of Science 87, 968–978
Thomson, J. J. (1971). “A Defense of Abortion.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1(1), 47–66.
van Fraassen, B. C. (2008). Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.