Amy is the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, where she also directs the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies. She is also the editor of this blog. An optimist about imagination, she continues to champion its epistemic uses.
Epistemic Uses of Imagination: Three Key Themes
Christopher Badura and Amy Kind
This week The Junkyard is hosting a book symposium on our recently published volume, Epistemic Uses of Imagination. Though imagination is often used for fanciful or escapist purposes, there are many cases in which it functions in a more instructive way. Our book takes up this latter class of imaginings. In various ways, all of the contributions to the book address the same big-picture question: How can imagination be put to epistemic use? That is, how can imagination generate and/or justify beliefs?
The 15 papers of the book are divided into four sections: Modality and Modal Knowledge, Reasoning, Thought Experiments, and Understanding Self and Others. Each of these sections focuses on a particular context in which imagination seems to have epistemic usefulness.
As we discuss in our introduction to the volume, there are three additional themes that unite the papers across the sections: that there are constraints on imagination, that imagination as a skill, and that acts of imagination can sometimes provide an imaginer with imaginative justification. All three of these themes play an important role in addressing the big-picture question concerning the epistemic usefulness of imagination.
Chris obtained his PhD in Philosophy from the Ruhr University Bochum. When it comes to epistemic uses of imagination, he's interested in how logic and subject matter (or "aboutness") constrain imagination. He enjoyed editing the volume together with Amy and working with all the other contributors a lot.
In the symposium, there will be four different commentaries, each focusing on a different section of the book. Nathan Wildman will focus on the section concerning Modality and Modal Knowledge; Max Jones will focus on the section concerning Reasoning; Mike Stuart will focus on the section concerning Thought Experiments, and Olivia Bailey will focus on the section concerning Understanding Self and Others. Some of these contributions are more holistic in focusing on the main issues raised in the relevant section of the book, while some take a narrower approach. We are grateful to each commentator for their careful engagement with the book and for their insightful remarks, and we hope for a lively discussion!
To open the symposium, we thought we’d give a brief overview of how the three themes we just identified come into play in the various chapters of the book. Further discussion of these themes, plus a more detailed summary of each of the chapters, can be found in our introduction to the book.
Constraints on Imagination
Regardless of the use to which imagination is being put, imaginative projects typically start from some initial content that then unfolds to some further content. In epistemic uses of imagination, constraints come into play at both stages of this process. Constraints on the initial content can be thought of primarily as constraints on what we imagine (what-constraints), while constraints on the unfolding can be thought of primarily as constraints on how we imagine (how-constraints).
We see particular attention to how-constraints in the section on reasoning. For example, although there is widespread agreement that in epistemic uses of imagination the unfolding must be constrained by logic, there are questions about how the logic of imagination should best be specified, questions that are addressed in the contribution by Franz Berto (Chapter 6).
In contrast, there is a focus on what-constraints in most of the chapters in the section on understanding self and others. For example, in focusing on how exactly we should understand perspective-taking, both Julia Langkau (Chapter 13) and Luke Roelofs (Chapter 14) address issues relating to how we should specify the kind of imaginative endeavor in which we are engaged in terms of what we are supposed to imagine. Nick Wiltsher and Bence Nanay (Chapter 15) discuss the way that a given individual’s reality constrains what imaginative projects are available to them.
In other parts of the volume, Peter Kung’s discussion of the importance of mental imagery for the epistemology of modality (Chapter 1) and Margot Strohminger’s discussion of how we can best understand Galileo’s thought experiment (Chapter 10) also take up issues related to the constraints that must be in place in setting the initial content of one’s imaginative project.
Imagination as a Skill
Constraint-setting and obeying constraints are activities that one can be better or worse at. Correspondingly, imagining is an activity that one can be better or worse at. The fact that people differ with respect to how good they are at it is one of the paradigmatic features of activities that are skills. Someone who is very skilled at imagination in epistemic contexts is typically good at tethering their imagination to reality in just the right way so that they can learn from it. As this suggests, there are important connections between the first theme and this second one.
In discussing whether an imaginer can have epistemic access to experiential perspectives other than their own, Amy Kind’s contribution (Chapter 12) argues that questions about whether an imaginer has the ability to bridge epistemic divides will depend at least in parts on the imaginer’s imaginative capabilities. Another place where this theme comes through is in Derek Lam’s discussion (Chapter 2). In that chapter, Lam explores the consequences for the epistemology of modality that arise from people’s inability to imagine certain states of affairs and, more specifically, the extent to which it matters how that inability is to be explained. Michael Omoge’s attempt to psychologize metaphysical modality (Chapter 4) also seems to presuppose a conception of imagination as a skill. On his view, the more knowledge one has in a specific domain, the more disciplined and trained one’s imagination will be with respect to that domain, and this will affect the way that one can draw on one’s imagination in drawing conclusions about metaphysically modal claims.
Imaginative Justification
As almost every single contributor to this volume would agree, at least some such imaginative exercises seem to supply the imaginer with justification. The vast majority of our contributors are optimists about the justificatory role of imagination. Defending this optimism requires one to answer an important question: How does such justification work? Although many of the contributions to this volume take up this theme, they do not all provide the same sort of answer.
In some of the contributions – particularly those in the section on reasoning – the kind of justification seems to be understood as analogous to that provided by logical reasoning. This comes up especially clearly in the chapter by Joshua Myers (Chapter 5), who argues that we can reason with imagination analogously to the way that we can reason with beliefs. But we also see it in Christopher Badura’s contribution (Chapter 7), which aims to provide a rigorous understanding of the unfolding process of imaginative episodes as well as an explanation of how imaginative justification is provided via this process.
In other contributions, however, the kind of justification seems to be understood as analogous to perceptual justification. For example, the discussion by Rebecca Hanrahan (Chapter 3) of how we use sensory imagination to determine whether a river is crossable, appeals to this analogy. As she argues, it’s in cases where my epistemic twin could take this imagining to be a veridical perception that the imagining would provide me with reason for belief. Eric Peterson also relies on an analogy to perception in explaining imagination’s epistemic significance (Chapter 11). As Peterson argues, just as the epistemic significance of perception depends crucially on what is being attended to, a proper accounting of the epistemic significance of imagination will also assign a crucial role to attention. On his view, we can see this particularly clearly in the case of thought experiments: the way that thought experiments direct our attention is what accounts, at least in part, for their ability to play an important epistemic role. Finally, we see yet another explanation of imaginative justification in the contribution by Margherita Arcangeli (Chapter 9), one that depends on seeing imagination as fundamentally a simulative activity.
With respect to optimism about imaginative justification, Antonella Mallozzi, whose contribution (Chapter 8) focuses on Williamson’s criticism of the a priori/a posteriori distinction, is the one outlier. Though Mallozzi agrees that imagination can be epistemically helpful in our search for truth, she does not think that its epistemic role is best understood as one involving justification. Rather, she thinks it is best understood as a helpful but ultimately dispensable reasoning tool. Nevertheless, she leaves open the possibility that in at least some contexts, there might be a more significant epistemic role for (some types of) imagination.
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As this brief overview shows, the philosophical discussion of epistemic uses of imagination has at this point largely moved beyond the question of whether imagination can play an epistemic role to the question of how it can play that epistemic role. In our view, any answer to this question will likely have to engage in some way with the themes that we have outlined here.