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.