Alice Murphy is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, University of Munich. Her current research focuses on scientific understanding and the role of aesthetic values in theories and experiments. She completed her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020 with a thesis on the imagination in scientific thought experiments.
A post by Alice Murphy and Federica I. Malfatti
Philosophers of science have begun taking seriously the way that scientists use their imagination in modelling and theorising for epistemic ends. But what is the nature of imagination in science? It’s widely recognised that the imagination can take many forms. Consider imagining a tree in your garden. One way you could imagine this is by holding a mental image of a tree in your mind. But we could also imagine in a purely propositional way; i.e. you could imagine that there is a tree in your garden, without forming any accompanying mental image. Salis and Frigg (2020) have argued that it is only this latter type of imagination that is of import in the scientific domain. On their view, mental imagery is neither a sufficient nor a necessary type of imagination for scientific models and thought experiments. However, it is unclear whether their view is restricted to the role of imagination in acquiring knowledge as they do not discuss other epistemic or cognitive goods such as understanding. And while others, such as Breitenbach (2020), have discussed imagination in achievements of scientific understanding, it is not explicit what the nature of the imagination is taken to be. Additionally, the learning from imagination literature discusses different types of imagination, yet its focus tends to be on the imagination as a route to knowledge (for example, see Kind and Kung (2016)). This is especially interesting given that, as we shall see, language of “seeing” is often utilised in accounts of understanding.
Federica I. Malfatti is a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck. She studied philosophy at the universities of Pavia, Mainz and Heidelberg. She obtained her PhD at the University of Innsbruck in 2020 with a thesis on the nature of understanding. Her research interests lie at the intersection between (social) epistemology and the philosophy of science.
How exactly understanding relates to knowledge is an open question in the current literature[1]. However, so much is clear: it is possible for us to truly believe or even to know that something is the case without understanding the corresponding fact. Further, knowing an explanation is sometimes also not enough for achieving understanding. Suppose, for example, that a reliable expert conveys to me the true, well-grounded information that p is because of q, and that I take her word for it. While I may acquire knowledge of the explanation by simply believing the expert, I may still lack understanding of the fact explained. But why is this? What else do I need to do to acquire understanding of a fact, above believing a true, well-grounded explanation for it? What is the extra requirement needed for understanding?
One way in which this extra requirement is articulated is in terms of “seeing” or “grasping” some proposition or fact. For example, Grimm states that while we may take it that, say, a model is accurate, ‘we might nonetheless not “grasp” or “see” how the various parts of the model relate to one another’ (2011, 88). Similarly, for Riggs, understanding requires that ‘one somehow sees the ways things fit together’ (2003, 218). But exactly what is this grasping involved in understanding? There are various accounts of grasping available in the literature on scientific understanding. On one view, when we grasp a proposition or a fact, something changes phenomenologically; we gain a new access to an old content (Bourget 2017). This is often associated with an “aha” experience. However, it is often argued that a mere feeling of understanding is insufficient for proper understanding and is subsequently irrelevant from an epistemological perspective. Another set of views, the ability accounts, argue that grasping is a matter of being able to do things with information. For example, for Hills, grasping involves an ability to reason about new and unfamiliar cases (2016, 663); for Grimm, grasping is an ability to anticipate how manipulating a system, say by changing one part, would then impact the system overall (2010, 340-341). This results in an ability to answer “what if things would have been different”-type questions.[2] For our purposes here, we assume an ability account of grasping.
What should we make of this language of “seeing” in accounts of understanding? Is this a mere metaphor? Or does it reveal a connection between visual mental imagery and understanding? If we were to take the language literally, then we might think that grasping just is a matter of being able to imagine some system in a visual way and being able to see in our mind’s eye how different variations in parts of that system would affect it overall. Alternatively, we could state that the imaginability of some system (in a visual way) is a necessary condition for grasping. These options, we think, are too strong. In this sense, we follow de Regt (2017) who argues that visualisation is not necessary for understanding, but is an important tool that can enhance understanding. Similarly, Meynell (2020) argues that understanding is a matter of “getting the picture” in the sense that ‘features of pictorial content facilitate cognitive and evaluative procedures that are characteristic of understanding’ (2020, 26). But this is not to say that visual, mental imagery or pictorial representations such as in the form of diagrams, are necessary for understanding on her view. In light of this, our interest also concerns the ways in which visual imagination might facilitate understanding.
The first possible way concerns concreteness. De Regt discusses this in the context of the “intelligibility” of theories, i.e. their usability. On his view, part of the intelligibility of a theory comes from getting a feeling of the consequence of some theory in a concrete situation (2017, 102). And this can involve “seeing” these consequences, i.e. imagining them in a visual way. Furthermore, in the two examples of scientific imagination most often discussed – thought experiments and models – there is also an emphasis on concreteness. Part of the value of thought experiments is how they enable us to imagine abstract ideas in more concrete situations, which in turn allows us to gain understanding of complex theories that we otherwise might have found difficult to comprehend.[3] And a large motivation for the fiction view of scientific models has to do with how modelling involves scientists’ investigations on imaginary systems that would be concrete if they were real, which is contrasted with a view that takes models as mathematical objects (Godfrey Smith 2006).
The second way that visual, mental imagery might enhance understanding has to do with the relations between visualisation and our visual capacities. Visual, mental imagery is “quasi-sensory” or “perception-like’; it has a phenomenal quality similar to ordinary perception. For de Regt, given that seeing is so central to our experience of, and cognitive interactions with, the world, it makes sense that when we want to go beyond what we can observe directly, we use our visual skills to form mental images (2017, 257). Likewise, Meynell emphasises that images—mental or otherwise—have a spatial resemblance to whatever it is that they represent. And because of this, they have implicit content that is derived from our knowledge of reality and causality (2020, 52). This, in turn, can perhaps facilitate the abilities associated with grasping in understanding as on Hills’ and Grimm’s views described above. That is to say, forming visual, mental images can aid the application of some principle to new cases, as well as contributing to the capacity to answer “what if things had been different” questions.
While much of the language around “seeing” in understanding has been left underexplored both in philosophy of science and more broadly in discussions of learning from imagination, there are some explicit connections made between visual, mental imagery and understanding that offer a starting point. However, a closer look at the connections between scientific understanding and visual, mental imagery raises a number of questions. To begin with, we can ask: How “filled in” or vivid do mental images need to be in order to facilitate understanding? Would more detailed, visual images be more useful when developing the abilities associated with grasping, or can they be highly schematic, perhaps mainly preserving structural features? This would be especially interesting in light of the emerging research on aphantasia i.e., the reduced capacity to experience mental images, as well as the rates of aphantasia amongst scientists (Zeman et. al 2015; 2020, see also Blomkvist 2021). Secondly, it is perhaps too restrictive to think of only visual, mental imagery when looking beyond the propositional imagination in science and in accounts of scientific understanding. Instead, we should think more broadly in terms of the sensory imagination, as well as in terms of embodiment in imagination. This would offer a fruitful connection with the work of Toon (2015) who utilises work on extended cognition in psychology and cognitive science in order to argue that understanding is not just “in the head”; it extends to the body and to external, material devices. If Toon is right, and understanding is not just a psychological act, then this has interesting implications for theories of how the imagination, and what kind of imagination, facilitates scientific understanding.
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We want to thank those who attended our event “Seeing in Understanding” at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy in July 2021 for their helpful comments.
[1] So-called “reductionists” believe that understanding reduces to knowledge (Kelp 2015, Khalifa 2017). So-called anti-reductionists question this on various grounds (Dellsén 2017, Elgin 2017).
[2] Other ability accounts of understanding are offered by Elgin (2017) and Wilkenfeld (2013). For critical discussion, see Khalifa (2017).
[3] For more on thought experiments and understanding, see Stuart (2016; 2018).
References
Blomkvist, A. 2021. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2021/2/5/whos-got-aphantasia-switching-the-focus-from-visual-imagery
Bourget, D. 2017. “The Role of Consciousness in Grasping and Understanding.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95(2): 285-318.
Breitenbach, A. 2020. “One Imagination in Experiences of Beauty and Achievements of Understanding.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 60 (1), 71-88
Dellsén, F. 2017. “Understanding Without Justification or Belief.” Ratio 30, 3: 239-254.
Elgin, C. Z. 2017. True Enough. MIT Press.
Godfrey Smith, P. 2006. “The Strategy of Model-Based Science”. Biology and Philosophy 21 (5):725- 740.
Grimm, S. 2011. “Understanding”. In S. Bernecker & D. Pritchard (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. New York: Routledge
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Meynell, L. 2020. “Getting the Picture: Towards a New Account of Scientific Understanding”. The Aesthetics of Science; Beauty, Imagination and Understanding, edited by Milena Ivanova and Steven French, Routledge.
Regt, H. W. de. 2017. Understanding Scientific Understanding. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Science. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Riggs, W. D. 2003. “Understanding “Virtue” and the Virtue of Understanding.” In M. DePaul & L. Zagzebski (Eds.), Intellectual virtue: Perspectives from ethics and epistemology (pp. 203–226). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Salis, F., and R. Frigg. 2020. “Capturing the Scientific Imagination.” The Scientific Imagination, edited by Peter Godfrey-Smith and Arnon Levy. Oxford University Press.
Stuart, M. T. 2016. “Taming Theory with Thought Experiments: Understanding and Scientific Progress.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 58: 24–33
Stuart, M. T. 2018. “How Thought Experiments Increase Understanding”. In The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments, edited by Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach J. H. Fehige, and James Robert Brown. Routledge
Toon, A. 2015. “Where is the Understanding?” Synthese 192 (12): 3859-3875
Wilkenfeld, D. A. 2013. “Understanding as Representation Manipulability”. Synthese 190: 997-1016.
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Zeman, A., F. Milton, S. Della Sala, M. Dewar, T. Frayling, J. Gaddum, A. Hattersley, et al. 2020. “Phantasia–The Psychological Significance of Lifelong Visual Imagery Vividness Extremes.” Cortex