Sometimes we learn through the use of imagination. The epistemology of imagination asks how this is possible. One barrier to progress on this question has been a lack of agreement on how to characterize imagination; for example, is imagination a mental state, ability, character trait, or cognitive process? This paper argues that we should characterize imagination as a cognitive ability, exercises of which are cognitive processes. Following dual process theories of cognition developed in cognitive science, the set of imaginative (...) processes is then divided into two kinds: one that is unconscious, uncontrolled, and effortless, and another that is conscious, controlled, and effortful. This paper outlines the different epistemological strengths and weaknesses of the two kinds of imaginative process, and argues that a dual process model of imagination helpfully resolves or clarifies issues in the epistemology of imagination and the closely related epistemology of thought experiments. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

The “Community of Inquiry” as it is used in the context of doing philosophy with children, is a phrase that refers to a pedagogical method in which groups of children and adults come together to discuss a targeted philosophical issue.1 Generally, a philosophical topic is decided upon and initial questions or ideas may be proposed, which are used to generate a discussion among participants. One of the most important features of such a discussion, when well organized, is that all participants (...) are provided with an opportunity to express their opinions and positions, with an express objective of doing away with an adult/child or teacher/student power differential. A model COI provides a place for many philosophical perspectives and opinions. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

Descartes’ Rules for the direction of the mind presents us with a theory of knowledge in which imagination, considered as an “aid” for the intellect, plays a key role. This function of schematization, which strongly resembles key features of Proclus’ philosophy of mathematics, is in full accordance with Descartes’ mathematical practice in later works such as La Géométrie from 1637. Although due to its reliance on a form of geometric intuition, it may sound obsolete, I would like to show that (...) this has strong echoes in contemporary philosophy of mathematics, in particular in the trend of the so called “philosophy of mathematical practice”. Indeed Ken Manders’ study on the Euclidean practice, along with Reviel Netz’s historical studies on ancient Greek Geometry, indicate that mathematical imagination can play a central role in mathematical knowledge as bearing specific forms of inference. Moreover, this role can be formalized into sound logical systems. One question of general epistemology is thus to understand this mysterious role of the imagination in reasoning and to assess its relevance for other mathematical practices. Drawing from Edwin Hutchins’ study of “material anchors” in human reasoning, I would like to show that Descartes’ epistemology of mathematics may prove to be a helpful resource in the analysis of mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

Modal epistemologies that rely on a fallibilism about modal claims have been gaining traction over the years. This paper critically discusses the accounts of Kung (2009, 2010, 2016) and Dohrn (2018, 2019, 2020b) and argues that they are invariably susceptible to being read as entailing claims of epistemic possibility. Both Kung and Dohrn seek to ground modal intuitions on non‐modal ones, and primarily appeal to the modalizing capacity of imagination to aid in the discovery of modal truths. However, insofar as (...) inference from non‐modal imagination to modal truths remains fallible, then no non‐ad hocdistinction can be made between substantiation of fallible metaphysically modal claims and infallible epistemically modal ones. This is because, barring an agent's infallible knowledge of modal truths, how these truths are argued for must attend the agent's imperfect epistemic access thereof, therefore entailing claims of modality consistent with her epistemic state—that is, claims of epistemic possibility. If modal epistemologies in general non‐modally ground their modal assertions in this fallible fashion, then they seem inevitably interpretable in terms of epistemic possibility as opposed to some non‐epistemic reading of metaphysical possibility. (shrink)

For Spinoza’s epistemology, an image is an idea that represents an external body as actually existent. This kind of knowledge is the only source of inadequate knowledge, falsity, and error. On the contrary, reason is adequate knowledge because it comprehends common notions, i.e, properties of different things. Intuition is also adequate knowledge because it conceives formal essences of singular things. The main example is the genetic definition of a sphere, an adequate knowledge form by the power of thinking of (...) the mind, without regard to existing extramental spheres. From these differences, some scholars conclude that imagination is always negative and should not deal with reason and intuition. But this conclusion will ban Spinoza’s epistemology from having adequate knowledge of existing individuals, such as Moses and the Hebrew State. In front of this view, this paper defends three theses: firstly, that the difference between the three kinds of knowledge is of genus, not of degree. Secondly, that adequate knowledge for Spinoza is a generic knowledge, i.e., insofar as S knows P insofar S deduces the effects, consequences, or properties of P. Thirdly, that adequate knowledge can include imagination through the proper use of the geometric method. In this case, imagination offers data to reason and intuition for having adequate knowledge of singular things that actually existed. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways--from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other's perspectives. Medina's epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social (...) practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism. (shrink)

The problem of imaginative resistance holds interest for aestheticians, literary theorists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and epistemologists. We present a somewhat opinionated overview of the philosophical discussion to date. We begin by introducing the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. We then review existing responses to the problem, giving special attention to recent research directions. Finally, we consider the philosophical significance that imaginative resistance has—or, at least, is alleged to have—for issues in moral psychology, theories of cognitive architecture, and modal epistemology.

Imagination is necessary for scientific practice, yet there are no in vivo sociological studies on the ways that imagination is taught, thought of, or evaluated by scientists. This article begins to remedy this by presenting the results of a qualitative study performed on two systems biology laboratories. I found that the more advanced a participant was in their scientific career, the more they valued imagination. Further, positive attitudes toward imagination were primarily due to the perceived role of imagination in problem-solving. (...) But not all problem-solving episodes involved clear appeals to imagination, only maximally specific problems did. This pattern is explained by the presence of an implicit norm governing imagination use in the two labs: only use imagination on maximally specific problems, and only when all other available methods have failed. This norm was confirmed by the participants, and I argue that it has epistemological reasons in its favour. I also found that its strength varies inversely with career stage, such that more advanced scientists do (and should) occasionally bring their imaginations to bear on more general problems. A story about scientific pedagogy explains the trend away from (and back to) imagination over the course of a scientific career. Finally, some positive recommendations are given for a more imagination-friendly scientific pedagogy. (shrink)

A very influential idea in the epistemology of modality is that we acquire knowledge of metaphysical modality through knowledge of essence. As a consequence, the epistemology of essence becomes crucial in the attempt to answer the question of how we come to know modal propositions. In this paper I investigate Lowe’s and Hale’s approach to the epistemology of essence and argue that both of them remain in a crucial, structural sense incomplete. Systematizing this criticism against Lowe and (...) Hale, I then break down desiderata of what I call a structurally complete picture of the epistemology of essence. Finally, I discuss Husserl’s epistemology of essence and defend it against a notorious objection. However, Husserl’s approach also seems to remain incomplete, due to its appeal to imagination, which operates on the basis of background assumptions that are themselves in need of justification. I indicate, however, that a Husserlian theory of intuitive awareness of universals might supply us with (direct) justification of these background assumptions and, hence, that we might be able to paint a structurally complete picture of the epistemology of essence with Husserlian means. (shrink)

Pretense imagination is imagination understood as the ability to recreate rational belief revision. This kind of imagination is used in pretend-play, risk-assessment, etc. Some even claim that this kind of hypothetical belief revision can be grounds to justify new beliefs in conditionals, in particular conditionals that play a foundational role in the epistemology of modality. In this paper, I will argue that it cannot. I will first provide a very general theory of pretense imagination, which I formalise using tools (...) from dynamic epistemic logic. As a result, we can clearly see that pretense imagination episodes are build up out of two kinds of imaginative stages, so I will present an argument by cases. This argument shows that pretense imagination might indeed provide us with justification for believing certain conditionals. Despite this, I will argue that these are not the kind of conditionals that allow pretense imagination to play a foundational role in the epistemology of modality. (shrink)

Scientists recognize the necessity of imagination for solving tough problems. But how does the cognitive faculty responsible for daydreaming help in solving scientific problems? Philosophers claim that imagination is informative only when it is constrained to be maximally realistic. However, using a case study from space science, we show that scientists use imagination intentionally to break reality-oriented constraints. To do this well, they first target low-confidence constraints, and then higher-confidence constraints, until a plausible solution is found. This paper exemplifies a (...) new approach to epistemology of imagination that focuses on sets of imaginings (rather than individual imaginings), and responsible (rather than reliable) imaginings. (shrink)

Imagination plays a rich epistemic role in our cognitive lives. For example, if I want to learn whether my luggage will fit into the overhead compartment on a plane, I might imagine trying to fit it into the overhead compartment and form a justified belief on the basis of this imagining. But what explains the fact that imagination has the power to justify beliefs, and what is the structure of imaginative justification? In this paper, I answer these questions by arguing (...) that imaginings manifest an epistemic status: they are epistemically evaluable as justified or unjustified. This epistemic status grounds their ability to justify beliefs, and they accrue this status in virtue of being based on evidence. Thus, imaginings are best understood as justified justifiers. I argue for this view by way of showing how it offers a satisfying explanation of certain key features of imaginative justification that would otherwise be puzzling. I also argue that imaginings exhibit a number of markers of the basing relation, which further motivates the view that imaginings can be based on evidence. The arguments in this paper have theoretically fruitful implications not only for the epistemology of imagination, but for accounts of reasoning and epistemic normativity more generally. (shrink)

According to the additive view of sensory imagination, mental imagery often involves two elements. There is an image-like element, which gives the experiences qualitative phenomenal character akin to that of perception. There is also a non-image element, consisting of something like suppositions about the image's object. This accounts for extra- sensory features of imagined objects and situations: for example, it determines whether an image of a grey horse is an image of Desert Orchid, or of some other grey horse. The (...) view promises to give a simple and intuitive explanation of some puzzling features of imagination, and, further, to illuminate imagination 's relation to modal knowledge. I contend that the additive view does not fulfil these two promises. The explanation of how images come to be determinate is redundant: the content constituting the indeterminate mental images on which the view relies is sufficient to deliver determinate images too, so the extra resources offered by the view are not required.. (shrink)

In the last few years, several philosophers have highlighted the social dimension of imagination. In this paper I argue that thought experiments prompt social uses of imaginings if we understand them as props in games of make-believe. In prescribing to imagine stories that develop through fictional narratives, authors of thought experiments prompt their readers to engage in the same imaginative project—at least in its salient aspects—and to endorse their conclusions. Contributions on this topic focus on cases where coordination across imaginers (...) is immediately successful. However, this is not the end of the story. I draw attention to situations where this is not the case, as the practice of thought experimentation often proceeds through criticism, rejections, and amendments. I focus on cases where imaginers do not endorse the conclusion proposed by the author of a thought experiment and either (i) fully reject the principles of generation, (ii) draw different fictional truths from the same principles, or (iii) amend the principles. Although cases of imaginative disharmony are usually dismissed as failures, I acknowledge them as fruitful steps in the cognitive advancement achievable by thought experiments. Cooperative imaginers challenge the rules of the game in meaningful ways, which leads to enhancing fictional scenarios and framing them through different perspectives. (shrink)

Mental imagery often occurs during testimonial belief transmission: a testifier often episodically remembers or imagines a scene while describing it, while a listener often imagines that scene as it’s described to her. I argue that getting clear on imagery’s psychological roles in testimonial belief transmission has implications for some fundamental issues in the epistemology of testimony. I first appeal to imagery cases to argue against a widespread “internalist” approach to the epistemology of testimony. I then appeal to the (...) same sort of case to argue for an alternative, externalist view. (shrink)

This book offers a polyphonic theory of protest as a mechanism for political communication, group constitution, and epistemic empowerment. The book analyzes the communicative power of protest to break social silences and disrupt insensitivity and complicity with injustice. Medina also elucidates the power of protest movements to transform social sensibilities and change the political imagination. Medina’s theory of protest examines the obligations that citizens and institutions have to give proper uptake to protests and to communicatively engage with protesting publics in (...) all their diversity, without excluding or marginalizing radical voices and perspectives. Throughout the book, communicative and epistemic arguments are given for the value of imagining with protest movements and for taking seriously the radical political imagination exercised in social movements of liberation. Medina’s theory sheds light on the different ways in which protest can be silenced and the different communicative and epistemic injustices that protest movements can face, arguing for forms of epistemic activism that resist silencing and communicative/epistemic injustices while empowering protesting voices. While arguing for democratic obligations to give proper uptake to protest, the book underscores how demanding listening to protesting voices can be under conditions of oppression and epistemic injustice. A central claim of the book is that responsible citizens have an obligation to echo (or express communicative solidarity with) the protests of oppressed groups that have been silenced and epistemically marginalized. Studying social uprisings, the book further argues that citizens have a duty to join protesting publics when grave injustices are in the public eye. (shrink)

This chapter argues that epistemic uses of the imagination are a sui generis form of reasoning. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, there are imaginings which instantiate the epistemic structure of reasoning. Second, reasoning with imagination is not reducible to reasoning with doxastic states. Thus, the epistemic role of the imagination is that it is a distinctive way of reasoning out what follows from our prior evidence. This view has a number of important implications for the epistemology of (...) the imagination. For one thing, it clarifies the epistemic role of widely invoked “constraints” on the imagination. For another, it highlights important and underappreciated disanalogies between how perceptual experiences and imaginings justify beliefs. Ultimately, the view that we can reason with imagination offers an illuminating and theoretically fruitful framework through which to understand the epistemic structure of the imagination. (shrink)

Imagination is important for many things in science: solving problems, interpreting data, designing studies, etc. Philosophers of imagination typically account for the productive role played by imagination in science by focusing on how imagination is constrained, e.g., by using self-imposed rules to infer logically, or model events accurately. But the constraints offered by these philosophers either constrain too much, or not enough, and they can never account for uses of imagination that are needed to break today’s constraints in order to (...) make progress tomorrow. Thus, epistemology of imagination needs to make room for an element of epistemological anarchy. (shrink)

The fourteen papers in this collection offer a variety of original contributions to the epistemology of modality. In seeking to explain how we might account for our knowledge of possibility and necessity, they raise some novel questions, develop some unfamiliar theoretical perspectives, and make some intriguing proposals. Collectively, they advance our understanding of the field. In Part I of this Introduction, I give some general background about the contemporary literature in the area, by sketching a timeline of the main (...) tendencies of the past twenty-five years or so, up to the present debates. Next, I focus on four features that largely characterize the latest literature, and the papers in the present collection in particular: (i) an endorsement of the importance of essentialism; (ii) a shift to a “metaphysics-first” approach to modal epistemology; (iii) a focus on metaphysical modality as opposed to other kinds of modality; and (iv) a preference for non-uniform modal epistemology. In Part II, I present the individual papers in the volume. These are organized around the following four chapters, based on their topic: (A) Skepticism & Deflationism; (B) Essentialism; (C) Non-Essentialist Accounts; (D) Applications. -/- LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS: Francesco Berto; Stephen Biggs & Jessica Wilson; Justin Clark-Doane; Philip Goff; Bob Hale; Frank Jackson; Mark Jago; Boris Kment; Antonella Mallozzi; Graham Priest; Gabriel Rabin; Amie Thomasson; Anand Vaidya & Michael Wallner; Jennifer Wang. -/- The volume is dedicated to the memory of Bob Hale. -/- . (shrink)

Pretense imagination is imagination understood as the ability to recreate rational belief revision. This kind of imagination is used in pretend-play, risk-assessment, etc. Some even claim that this kind of hypothetical belief revision can be grounds to justify new beliefs in conditionals, in particular conditionals that play a foundational role in the epistemology of modality. In this paper, I will argue that it cannot. I will first provide a very general theory of pretense imagination, which I formalise using tools (...) from dynamic epistemic logic. As a result, we can clearly see that pretense imagination episodes are build up out of two kinds of imaginative stages, so I will present an argument by cases. This argument shows that pretense imagination might indeed provide us with justification for believing certain conditionals. Despite this, I will argue that these arenotthe kind of conditionals that allow pretense imagination to play a foundational role in the epistemology of modality. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have been skeptical that the imagination can justify beliefs about the actual world. After all, how could merely imagining something give you any reason to believe that it is true? However, within the past decade or so, a lively debate has emerged over whether the imagination can justify empirical belief and, if so, how. This paper provides a critical overview of the recent literature on the epistemology of imagination and points to avenues for future research.

Imagination occupies a central place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, following a period of relative neglect there has been an explosion of interest in imagination in the past two decades as philosophers examine the role of imagination in debates about the mind and cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as well as epistemology, science and mathematics. This outstanding _Handbook_ contains over thirty specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers organised into six clear sections examining the most important aspects of the (...) philosophy of imagination, including: Imagination in historical context: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl, and Sartre What is imagination? The relation between imagination and mental imagery; imagination contrasted with perception, memory, and dreaming Imagination in aesthetics: imagination and our engagement with music, art, and fiction; the problems of fictional emotions and ‘imaginative resistance’ Imagination in philosophy of mind and cognitive science: imagination and creativity, the self, action, child development, and animal cognition Imagination in ethics and political philosophy, including the concept of 'moral imagination' and empathy Imagination in epistemology and philosophy of science, including learning, thought experiments, scientific modelling, and mathematics. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy _of Imagination_ is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and psychology, aesthetics, and ethics. It will also be a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology and art. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Imagine, as most economists do, that financial-market participants understand the basic structure of the world: While they cannot predict the future with certainty, they are endowed with knowledge of the possible outcomes of their actions and the probability that each of those outcomes will occur. Given these assumptions, if bankers, regulators, investors, and rating agencies were rational, we may conclude that the financial crisis was caused by poor incentives: These actors must have knowingly jeopardized their institutions and the global (...) economy to pursue private gain. Alternatively, market participants, caught up in the mania of crowds, may have irrationally ignored risks of which they were aware and of which they knew the correct probability. Neither of these explanations for the financial crisis stands up to the evidence, since both explanations assume that the participants knew the U.S. housing market was about to crash. A fresh look at the data five years later suggests that they were ignorant of this fact, and that they acted rationally (or at least reasonably) in light of what they (thought that they) knew. This allows a more nuanced understanding of how financial institutions ended up in bedlam, why credit markets collapsed, and why they took so long to recover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 314-334 [Access article in PDF] The Epistemology of Cognitive Literary Studies F. Elizabeth Hart I Literary scholars have begun incorporating the insights of cognitive science into literary studies, bringing to bear on questions of literary experience the results of explorations within a wide range of fields that define today's cognitive science. The investigation of the human mind and its reasoning processes encompasses a (...) rich variety of empirical and speculative disciplines, including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, computer science, philosophy, and anthropology. These disciplines are all related to one another by the questions they ask about the brain and mind and the ground they cover in staking out their research agendas; but each also contributes uniquely in terms of individual scope and focus. Literary critics, eavesdropping on this maturing coalition, are now producing critical works that apply cognitive research to a similarly impressive range of literary concerns, with results so far that seem to span the gap between traditional and more contemporary literary critical approaches.All such criticism is dependent on scientific studies of the brain and mind and so accepts axiomatically some degree of epistemological efficacy in scientific empiricism. But this acceptance has not been naive or uncritical and has, in fact, been at times carefully qualified by critics' sensitivity to debate--to the lack of consensus among cognitive scientists, and to the fact that cognitive science is itself in its infancy stage, with its own practitioners often openly tentative about their results and descriptive capabilities. As it happens, such debate, in recent years, has even proven beneficial for literary scholarship since an important [End Page 314] paradigm shift has taken place that now makes some aspects of cognitive science more compatible than ever with the interests of literary studies. This is because, whereas an earlier phase of cognitive science focused its energies on Artificial Intelligence and on theories of language and psychology that supported AI, grounding its theories implicitly in a metaphor of the mind as a computer, today's cognitive scientists tend to concentrate instead on the more organic metaphor of the "embodiment" of mind, that is, of the mind's substantive indebtedness to its bodily, social, and cultural contexts, and on the figurative phenomena of metaphor, metonymy, image schemata, "fields," "frames," other "integrative mental spaces" (as they are called), and the gradient structures and prototypical bases of semantic categories, all of which contribute to recasting human reason into a set of highly imaginative--not logical but figural--processes. 1 For literary theory and criticism, this shift in cognitive science toward "the body in the mind" 2 --tantamount to a wholesale rejection of philosophical rationalism--has given rise to a new kind of interdisciplinary practice, to the potential for a sincere engagement between diverse sciences and even between literature and science that stretches all the bounds of what literary scholars generally mean when they speak of being interdisciplinary (e.g., exchanges with history, art history, anthropology, film studies, sociology).In the discussion that follows, I would like to explore this new interdisciplinarity in literary studies by examining its epistemological implications. I begin with a description of the kinds of criticism now being produced under the rubric of cognitive literary criticism or--to reflect the field's scope more accurately--cognitive and cognitive-evolutionary criticism. This description is not intended as a comprehensive or evaluative survey, since in-depth review articles of extant works are available elsewhere. 3 Rather, I hope to familiarize my readers with the basic orientations of this theory and criticism so that they can grasp the epistemological relations that will become the essay's focus. To lay a further groundwork for this focus, I will review various uses of the term "cognitive" (or "cognitivism") in the scholarship and offer an analysis of its meanings, first in cognitive science and then in literary theory. Building, then, on what "cognitive" might signify for literary studies, I show how a literary approach based on today's cognitive science is uniquely situated among other approaches because of its underlying theory of human... (shrink)

In his recent work, ‘Sport, Aesthetic Experience, and Art as the Ideal Embodied Metaphor’, Tim L. Elcombe explores links between sport and art from a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience. However, Elcombe's work does not highlight the role of the imagination in the interpretation of the aesthetic something Michael Polanyi claims to be the ‘cornerstone of aesthetic theory’. With the backdrop of an increased interest in the aesthetics, phenomenology, and epistemology of sport, this discussion essay seeks to defend (...) the usefulness and value of definitional demarcation debates between sport and art, to use Polanyi’s distinctions among technical, scientific and artistic problems to support the claim that sport is not art, and to offer an account of how sport contributes in its own way to human flourishing and why it is no less valuable experientially than art. (shrink)

Upshot: Eigenform is a precondition for distinction and distinction is a precondition for eigenform. While my target article discussed eigenform and reflexivity, it could just as well have discussed distinctions and the emergence of distinctions. This theme was implicit in many of the comments. We make this circularity explicit for the sake of a deeper understanding.

How do we know the degree of imagination involved in knowing a reality? This is essentially an epistemological question. This essay discusses first the role of imagination in Polanyi’s epistemology since it is used here as the basis of integrative reality. The essay then discusses the degree of imagination involved in three types of integrative reality that are found respectively in technology, science, and humanities. It concludes with a discussion on the role of imagination in education.

As Hume famously claimed, we are nowhere more free than in our imagination. While this feature of imagination suggests that imagination has a crucial role to play in modal epistemology, it also suggests that imagining cannot provide us with any non-modal knowledge about the world in which we live. This chapter rejects this latter suggestion. Instead it offers an account of “imagining under constraints,” providing a framework for showing when and how an imaginative project can play a justificatory role (...) with respect to our beliefs about the world. That we can be free in our imaginings does not show that they must proceed unfettered; as is argued, our ability to constrain our imaginings in light of facts about the world enables us to learn from them. The important upshot is that imagination has considerably more epistemic significance than previously thought. (shrink)

The present paper proposes a route to modal claims that allows us to infer to certain possibilities even if they are sensorily unimaginable and beyond the evidential capacity of stipulative imagining. After a brief introduction, Sect. 2 discusses imaginative resistance to help carve a niche for the kinds of inferences about which this essay is chiefly concerned. Section 3 provides three classic examples, along with a discussion of their similarities and differences. Section 4 recasts the notion of potential explanation in (...) Lipton’s (Inference to the best explanation, Routledge, Abingdon, 2004) in order to accommodate inferences to possibility claims; Sect. 5 then attempts to characterise a principle underlying such inferences. Section 6 concludes by discussing how the proposal relates to other modal epistemologies, with emphasis on the potential of such inferences to produce genuinely new ideas. (shrink)

Vaidya has recently argued that while Husserl’s method for acquiring knowledge of essence through use of our imagination is subject to a vicious epistemic circle, we can still use the method to successfully attain objectual understanding of essence. In this paper, I argue that the Husserlian objectual understanding-based epistemology envisaged by Vaidya suffers from a similar epistemic circularity as its knowledge-based foil. I argue that there is a straight-forward solution to this problem, but then raise three serious problems for (...) an amended version of Vaidya’s proposal and any similar Husserlian epistemology of essence. The paper closes with some general reflections on applying the Husserlian method to the contemporary notion of essence and on the idea of refocusing the epistemology of essence on understanding instead of knowledge. (shrink)

In his recent work, ‘Sport, Aesthetic Experience, and Art as the Ideal Embodied Metaphor’, Tim L. Elcombe explores links between sport and art from a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience. However, Elcombe's work does not highlight the role of the imagination in the interpretation of the aesthetic something Michael Polanyi claims to be the ‘cornerstone of aesthetic theory’. With the backdrop of an increased interest in the aesthetics, phenomenology, and epistemology of sport, this discussion essay seeks to defend (...) the usefulness and value of definitional demarcation debates between sport and art, to use Polanyi’s distinctions among technical, scientific and artistic problems to support the claim that sport is not art, and to offer an account of how sport contributes in its own way to human flourishing and why it is no less valuable experientially than art. (shrink)

The imagination is ubiquitous in our cognitive lives. You might imagine rotating a puzzle piece to determine whether it fits in an open space, or imagine what things are like from another person's perspective to figure out how they are feeling, or imagine a new rug in your living room to determine whether it matches the color of your sofa. These examples are mundane, but they point to a deep philosophical puzzle: how could merely imagining something give you any reason (...) to believe that it is true? After all, you can imagine anything you want to, from the fictional to the fantastical. This has led many philosophers to be deeply skeptical of the epistemic value of the imagination. When imagination is accorded a justificatory role, it is typically limited to beliefs about what is metaphysically possible. More recently, some philosophers have begun to push back against this orthodoxy by arguing that the imagination can justify empirical beliefs about the actual world. But even then, most contemporary discussions focus on whether the imagination can justify empirical belief, rather than on how the imagination justifies empirical belief, thereby leaving many central questions about the epistemology of the imagination unanswered. This dissertation attempts to fill this lacuna by canvassing the theoretical landscape of this exciting new literature and developing an account of the epistemic structure of the imagination. The first chapter sets the stage for the rest of the dissertation by reviewing extant arguments for and against the view that the imagination can justify empirical belief before posing a new argument in its favor. The second chapter argues that imaginative justification is mediate but non-inferential; it depends on one’s prior justification without depending on an inference from one’s prior beliefs. The third chapter argues that the imagination is informative—it can represent new content and generate new justification—in virtue of its analog representational format. The fourth and final chapter argues that some imaginings just are beliefs, and that this grounds their justificatory force. Together, the arguments of this dissertation suggest that the imagination is a distinctive kind of ampliative reasoning, and that it plays this cognitive and epistemic role by combining the analog representational format of imagery with the evidence-sensitive function of belief. (shrink)

Thought experiments, models, diagrams, computer simulations, and metaphors can all be understood as tools of the imagination. While these devices are usually treated separately in philosophy of science, this paper provides a unified account according to which tools of the imagination are epistemically good insofar as they improve scientific imaginings. Improving scientific imagining is characterized in terms of epistemological consequences: more improvement means better consequences. A distinction is then drawn between tools being good in retrospect, at the time, and in (...) general. In retrospect, tools are evaluated straightforwardly in terms of the quality of their consequences. At the cutting edge, tools are evaluated positively insofar as there is reason to believe that using them will have good consequences. Lastly, tools can be generally good, insofar as their use encourages the development of epistemic virtues, which are good because they have good epistemic consequences. (shrink)

This article introduces a series of measures of the geographical manifestation of a subset of unsolicited commercial email, i.e. spam, used to perpetrate 'advanced fee fraud'. Known as '419 spam', this activity has strong historic ties to Nigeria, where similar frauds were operated via physical letters and faxes during the 1970s and 1980s. This article's analysis reveals that 419 spam operates via a globally dispersed network that nevertheless contains a clear agglomeration of activity in West Africa. Building upon theories of (...) the intersection of cyberspace, states, and individuals, this article argues that 419 spam exemplifies the challenge offered by the Internet to the dominance of states by allowing individuals and movements to create social space that transcends borders. This process is an intriguing and ironic parallel to the description of the rise of the European nation-state as an 'imagined community' that challenged medieval systems of authority and existing social epistemologies. The emerging 'networks of imagination' developed by transnational social movements and criminal networks to define their sphere of operations present a similar challenge to the primacy of existing authority embedded in the state, particularly for states in crisis such as Nigeria. The article concludes with an examination of the off-line and online implications of 419 spam and its network of imagination for the Nigerian state and its inhabitants. Ranging from strengthening public conceptions of West Africa as a sea of corruption to a decreased ability to interact with the outside world, 419 spammers are playing an important, if illicit, role in the construction and use of Nigeria's and the world's Internet. (shrink)

In this paper we explore the notion of rehearsal as a way to develop an embodied and enactive account of imagining. After reviewing the neuroscience of motor imagery, we argue, in the context of performance studies, that rehearsal includes forms of imagining that involve motor processes. We draw on Sartre’s phenomenology of imagining which also suggests that imagining involves motor processes. This research in neuroscience and phenomenology, supports the idea of an embodied and enactive account of imagination.

Empathy is a familiar form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective taking. In this dissertation I offer an account of empathy’s moral importance that emphasizes the special value of its unique epistemic functions. Specifically, I defend what I call the humane understanding thesis: empathy is the source of a distinct epistemic good, humane understanding, which consists in the appreciation of the intelligibility of others’ emotional perceptions, and humane understanding is necessary for fully virtuous relations with other people. Adam Smith held that (...) empathy is the unique means by which we judge the propriety of other’s emotions. I draw out the kernel of truth in this surprising claim. Emotions inevitably present the world in a certain evaluative light. When I see my situation as calling out for my anger, or fear, or adoration, my emotion appears to me to be properly responsive to my situation. I can judge my emotion to be inappropriate, all things considered. However, I cannot both be angry at your betrayal and be totally mystified by my own anger, or resent you but see no absolutely nothing in your conduct that appears to call out for my resentment. This insight applies to empathy. When we empathize, we feel genuine emotions. And when we feel these emotions, we cannot fail to appreciate the intelligibility of the other’s original emotion first-hand. This appreciation constitutes humane understanding of the other’s emotion. I further clarify the nature of this epistemic achievement by distinguishing it from two other nearby forms of understanding, one that is achieved through narrative rather than perspective taking, and one that is achieved through unemotional perspective taking. Empathy has recently come in for some heavy criticism. It has been described as not only morally unnecessary, but positively morally corrosive. Recognizing that empathy is the unique means by which we secure humane understanding of others’ emotional perceptions enables us to appreciate aspects of empathy’s moral significance that its most prominent detractors have neglected. Humane understanding is a powerful way of being close to another person, and closeness is something that social beings like ourselves crave, not for any further or deeper purpose, but just because it is valuable to us in and of itself. People have a powerful need to be empathized with because empathy relieves a painful form of loneliness. Empathy can be a way of caring, rather than just a means of getting us to care. In further defense of empathy’s moral significance, I also argue that empathy has a meaningful role to play in the development of both our reflective beliefs about moral properties and our emotional sensitivity to those same properties. Empathy can allow us to discover new moral distinctions through imaginative emotional experience, and it can also help us to shape and sharpen our moral emotional perception. Finally, I round out my review of empathy’s moral significance with an argument that empathy with others makes it very difficult to intend to treat them in certain immoral ways. We cannot both empathize with someone and see them as unfeeling, as unthinking, or as lacking a normative perspective on the world. Consequently, empathizing with someone is at least not compatible with treating them as a mere object. I offer my Smithian picture of empathy’s moral and epistemic functions as an alternative to the popular Humean view that empathy moves us from our default position of solipsism and egoism to knowledge of and care for other’ inner lives. That view’s ambition is tantalizing, but it distorts both the nature of empathy and the nature of our other-oriented concern and understanding. Hume’s account of empathy’s significance, and the more recent accounts that take after it, end up making it look as though empathy simply contributes to the expansion of egoism, and/or as though empathy depends for its motivational efficacy on a kind of epistemic mistake. (shrink)

Appealing to imagination for modal justification is very common. But not everyone thinks that all imaginings provide modal justification. Recently, Gregory and Kung :620–663, 2010) have independently argued that, whereas imaginings with sensory imageries can justify modal beliefs, those without sensory imageries don’t because of such imaginings’ extreme liberty. In this essay, I defend the general modal epistemological relevance of imagining. I argue, first, that when the objections that target the liberal nature of non-sensory imaginings are adequately developed, those objections (...) also threaten the sensory imaginings. So, if we think that non-sensory imaginings are too liberal for modal justification, we should say the same about sensory imaginings. I’ll finish my defense by showing that, when it comes to deciding between saying that all imaginings are prima facie justificatory and saying that no imaginings are justificatory, there is an independent reason for accepting the former. (shrink)