Eric Peterson is an assistant professor of practice in business ethics at the Dolan School of Business of Fairfield University. He is also an affiliate faculty member at the Waide Center for Applied Ethics at Fairfield University. He is interested in too many things. These include business ethics, imagination, and philosophy of religion. He still very much enjoys being the Managing Editor for this wonderful blog.
A post by Eric Peterson
In a recent post on this wonderful blog, Nick Wiltsher discusses three interrelated claims of which he is increasingly sympathetic towards. These are:
(1) Imagination has no distinctive epistemic ends.
(2) The epistemic ends that can be pursued using imagination are better achieved by other means.
(3) There is, all the same, value in using imagination to pursue (some) epistemic ends.
As he states, claim (3) only matters if (1) and (2) stand up, and he provides some hunches that can be the beginnings of arguments for each standing up. In this post, I want to explore whether a particular kind of knowledge might put pressure on (1) and (2).
In some recent work, Matthew Benton (2017, 2025) argues for and develops an epistemology of interpersonal relations. He provides interesting arguments to think that knowsi (read as interpersonally knows) is distinct from both the propositional sense of "knows" and the objectual/qualitative sense of "knows". Suppose that Benton is correct. Then on a plausible connection between imagination and interpersonal knowledge, it would follow that some imagining has a distinctive epistemic end and that this end is not better achieved by means other than imagination.
In what follows, I will briefly explain Benton’s notion of interpersonal knowledge and how he thinks it is distinct from propositional or qualitative knowledge. I will then make a plausible argument for the relation between imagination and interpersonal knowledge.
To see an intuitive distinction between propositional knowledge and interpersonal knowledge, consider this case from Benton (2017, 820-821)
Juan and Julia go to the same large committee meetings over many years. They know each other’s names and institutional roles, and know many other facts about each other; but they know all this from other sources, or by overhearing conversations each is having with other people. They hear each other offer suggestions in meetings, but they’ve never addressed each other individually in conversation. They have much first- and second-grade knowledge (propositional, qualitative, objectual) of each other. But intuitively, Julia and Juan do not know each other personally.
Such a case seems unexceptional and I suspect it strikes many people as capturing a distinctive way of knowing. That is, it seems plausible to make a distinction between propositional knowledge and interpersonal knowledge. According to Benton, interpersonal knowledge is a state of mind requiring second-personal encounters with someone (2017, 822). He claims that these conditions are captured by the following necessary conditions (recall that “know(s) with the subscript i should be read as “interpersonally knows”):
ENCOUNTER: S knowsi R only if (i) S has had reciprocal causal contact with R, in which (ii) S treats R second-personally, and (iii) R treats S second-personally. (822)
According to Benton, second-personal treatment minimally requires treating the other as a subject, in the language of address, or in joint attention to objects or topics of conversation (821). Now it is quite easy to see that Juan and Julia do not know each other personally in part because they do not meet any of the conditions of ENCOUNTER. Benton also argues that interpersonal knowledge is characterized by symmetry:
SYMMETRY: S knowsi R only if R knowsi S (826).
Elsewhere, he argues that interpersonal knowledge can be characterized by AUTONOMY and OPACITY:
AUTONOMY: One can know all manner of propositions about R without yet knowingi R; and one can knowi R without knowing any particular set of truths about them (and without any specific qualitative knowledge of them). (2025, 100)
OPACITY: One can knowi someone R while failing to believe that one knowsi R (under the relevant guise), and even while falsely believing (under a certain guise), that they do not exist. (2025, 100)
This overview of Benton should suffice for this short post. In fact, I think it reveals enough to show that interpersonal knowledge can be its own epistemic end (at least insofar as it is a distinct kind of knowledge that we value and pursue as an end). The next question, then, is how imagination relates to such knowledge.
Does interpersonal knowledge require imagining? I would argue that is does. One way of seeing this is by seeing the connection between interpersonal knowledge and empathy. Following Bailey (2020), we can take empathy to involve “using one’s imagination to ‘transport’ oneself, such that one considers the other’s situation as though one were occupying the other’s position.” (3) Bailey argues that empathy has a unique value in providing a certain kind of understanding, what she calls humane understanding. She claims that “[t]o humanely understand another’s emotions is to have a first-hand appreciation of the emotion’s intelligibility.” (8) It is important to realize that empathy and humane understanding can come in a second-personal variation. Central to the second-personal is this irreducible ‘I-You’ relation. One can empathize with and even humanely understand another without that other knowing or being aware of such empathy (of course, the empathizee could be a fictional character who doesn’t exist). However, second-personal empathy and humane understanding requires a shared stance and joint attention to for instance the intelligibility of the emotional experience. While you can be empathetic towards someone without it amounting to interpersonal knowledge, I do not think it is plausible for the reverse to hold. Interpersonal knowledge requires empathy. Benton (2025) acknowledges this arguing that there is a sort of “empathetic entanglement” in healthy relationships. However, if Bailey is right that empathy is a kind of imaginative transportation, then it follows that imagination (of certain kind) is essential to interpersonal knowledge. Now it is important to acknowledge that Wiltsher does raise and set to the side the potential connection between empathetic imagining and a certain epistemic end such as empathetic understanding. I think he is correct insofar as empathetic understanding need not result or lead to interpersonal knowledge. However, once we see interpersonal knowledge as a distinct epistemic end, it arguably is much harder to bracket off empathetic imagining—some empathetic imagining leads to a great epistemic end. If this is correct, then, it follows that imagination has at least one distinct epistemic end (interpersonal knowledge) and that there is not a better means of achieving it than imagination.
As with all of my posts, these ideas are tentative and in need of development. Perhaps empathetic help might come from this blog community.
References
Bailey, Olivia. (2020). Empathy and the Value of Humane Understanding. Philosophy and Phenomenal Research, 00:1–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12744
Benton, M. A. (2025). The epistemology of interpersonal relations. Nous, 59(1), 92-111.
Benton, M. A. (2017). Epistemology personalized. The Philosophical Quarterly, 67(269), 813-834.
Wiltsher, Nicholas. (April 30th, 2025). The Value of Epistemic Imagining. Blog post on The Junkyard.