Felipe Morales Carbonell just completed a postdoc on know-how at Universidad de Chile. He mainly works on epistemology (know-how, understanding) and philosophy of mind (imagination, representation).
A post by Felipe Morales Carbonell
Note: This is a side-piece to a longer essay I am working on, which focuses on how imagination can help us learn how to do things or how to act. The topic here is something I only minimally touch in the longer piece, and which I think is an important limitation of that work, so my goal here is to give some hints at a way to address it. In any case, the first section here summarizes the longer piece.
Imagining how
Let us consider a variation of Williamson’s (2016) illustration of the epistemic use of imagination, the case of a person who wants to cross a stream in the woods. There is some risk, so they have to decide what to do beforehand. In this case, they use their imagination. They imagine that if they run and jump over the stream, they could cross with certain risk; if they don’t propel themselves hard enough, they might fall to the water or hit the rocks. As they see some rocks in the stream bed, they imagine themselves jumping over them. While this could also work, it has the risk of slipping. Then, they imagine that if they used a stick for support, they could minimize the risk. At that point, they come up with a plan to cross the stream: first, they need to get a stick, and then they need to cross the stream jumping from rock to rock. We can say that they have imagined how to cross the stream.
What kind of imaginative attitude is it to imagine how? Williamson, I presume, would say that it is a mental act that consists in imaginatively considering a series of propositions. To give a roughly paraphrase of Stanley and Williamson’s (2001) characterization of knowing how: S imagines how to X if there is a way w such that S imagines they could X that way (I prefer to omit their appeal to practical modes of presentation, given that it is subtle in this case.)
This is not the only way to conceptualize imagining-how. A different way is to account for it in terms of certain relations to questions about how to do something. In this case, we could understand imagining-how as an imaginative way to have a relation with a question. The idea is somewhat odd, but we can make it somewhat more concrete by appealing to accounts of the nature of questions according to which they are some type of object (for example, divisions of logical space), and then say that we can have imaginative attitudes directed to such objects. If we allow this, other possibilities open up to account for imagining-how in terms of other kinds of objects. According to these theoretical options, imagining-how is a kind of relation to non-propositional objects. For example, we might want to say that imagining-how involves states directed to structures that represent actions of procedures (given my own theoretical preferences about know-how, this seems attractive to me, and I believe it can incorporate some ideas from other accounts, although I don’t have the space to develop this further here). If several of these options are viable, someone might want to describe the process of imagining how to do something in terms of sequences of mental states that can be characterized in any of these ways.
Supposing there is some way to make good sense of the notion of imagining-how, we need to explain how it is possible for such imaginative processes to lead to the acquisition of know-how or knowledge about how to do something (call this the informativeness problem). The standard way to do this in the current literature on imagination is to require that imaginative processes should be constrained in some ways. In the case of imagining-how, these constraints would have to do with the kind of goals we have and the kinds of objects we need to imagine, and are context-dependent (we are not required to impose the same constraints in every circumstance). In particular, we often want to imagine how to do something by imposing constraints on who does the tasks we imagine, the nature of these tasks, and the ways in which we think these tasks could be done, and we keep certain aspects of the subjects in question, their abilities and the circumstances, fixed. (Besides an account of the informativeness of imagination, in the case of imagining-how we also need to account for the way in which the content of imaginings-how can be integrated into the dispositional profile of the imagining subject, in which case we say that by imagining how to do something, they learn how to do it. My solution to this problem is admittedly partial, and depends on a model of cognition I don’t have space to elaborate on here, but feel free to ask.)
Imagining how and creativity
The sketched solution to the informativeness question concerning imagining-how has a problem. To explain, I will need to introduce a pair of concepts. The first is the concept of epistemic friction, which is (roughly) the way in which epistemic states are subject to constraints (for example, that it is good for our beliefs to adjust to the facts reflects that such beliefs are responsive to epistemic friction, which in this case amounts to the fact that only certain things are true, while others are not) (cf. Sher 2010, 2016). The second concept I need to introduce is that of epistemic freedom, which is the way in which epistemic states reflects some subject’s autonomy and creativity. It is worth noting that epistemic freedom is not merely the absence of epistemic friction (remember the distinction between negative and positive freedom, which suggests a similar point—either way, what we are interested here is something like an overall conception of freedom). Both epistemic friction and epistemic freedom are necessary for the goodness of epistemic states, or at the very least, they are dimensions in which our epistemic state can improve.
We can say that the epistemic status of our imaginative acts depends on a certain balance between the need for epistemic friction and freedom. Vaidya & Wallner (2021) discuss how the problem of epistemic friction affects modal knowledge in general, and evaluate how an imagination-based epistemology of modality could address the issue (although they prefer an essentialist epistemology). Kind (2022) describes this as a “push and pull” between the imposition of constraints and relaxing them, and links it to the claim that we understand the imagination as something we can be skillful about.
The case of imagining-how illustrates some further aspects of this general issue. Consider a situation where someone wants to create a new design for a chair. Part of this will require that they understand certain requirements that a chair must satisfy as an artifact with certain functions (depending on the context). However, someone could imagine how to build a chair in different but equally valid ways. Neither imposing constraints nor relaxing them is sufficient to explain the content of the relevant imaginative acts (Tom Schoonen discusses cases like this in his recent post, so you could take my observations here as complementary to what he is talking about there). To do that, we need to acknowledge the epistemic freedom of the imagining subjects.
In some cases, we enact our epistemic freedom not by reducing the number of constraints or by relaxing them, but precisely by imposing new constraints. Vedel’s children chairs (see Fig 1) serve the function of being a chair that children can use, but is also adaptable to the needs of a developing child, and this is what makes its modular features unique and distinctive. This is a new constraint, freely added.
Figure 1: Children's chair by Kristian Vedel (image source: Wikimedia Commons, CC)
In view of cases like this, we might require that new constraints should be compatible with the constraints already in place, but I think this would be a mistake. Precisely, we also use our imagination to assess whether constraints we might want to impose onto our imaginative acts are compatible or not with whatever constraints are already in place (cf. Stokes 2016). In order to imagine how, we need to be sensitive to the ways in which our goals are subject to epistemic friction, but we also need to be able to exercise our epistemic freedom, and this includes our capacity to make mistakes.
References
Kind, Amy (2022). Imagination and Creative Thinking. Cambridge University Press.
Sher, Gila (2010). Epistemic friction: Reflections on knowledge, truth, and logic. Erkenntnis 72 (2):151-176.
Sher, Gila (2016). Epistemic Friction: An Essay on Knowledge, Truth, and Logic. Oxford University Press.
Stokes, Dustin (2016). Imagination and creativity. In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination. Routledge.
Vaidya, Anand Jayprakash & Wallner, Michael (2021). The epistemology of modality and the problem of modal epistemic friction. Synthese 198 (Suppl 8):1909-1935.
Williamson, Timothy (2016). Knowing by imagining. In Amy Kind & Peter Kung (eds.) Knowldege through Imagination. Oxford University Press.