Technological products such as computer, communication, and consumer electronic products, apps, smart wearables, and streaming services have become inseparable from people’s lives. In technological fields of practice, imagination, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship may influence one another. A vivid imagination can generate creativity and trigger the entrepreneurial intention to “bring new things to the market.” This study aims to understand the formation of internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products. Drawing on social cognitive theory, this study explores and empirically tests how (...) technology product imagination disposition and social support impact internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products. Drawing from self-determination theory, this study proposes and examines the mediating role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the relationship between technology product imagination disposition and internet entrepreneurial intention, as well as the relationship between social support and internet entrepreneurial intention. We conducted a survey of 568 adults in Taiwan and used partial least squares to test our hypotheses. The results show the following: Technology product imagination disposition is positively associated with challenge, enjoyment, compensation, and outward motivation. Social support is positively associated with challenge, enjoyment, compensation, and outward motivation. Challenge, enjoyment, and outward motivation are positively associated with internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products. Technology product imagination disposition intensifies internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products by strengthening challenge, enjoyment, and outward motivation. Social support intensifies internet entrepreneurial intention by increasing challenge, enjoyment, and outward motivation. The partial mediation model represents a significant improvement in the total effect over the direct effect. We discuss the implications of these results for research and internet entrepreneurship practices. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that we have a great deal of freedom to imagine what we choose. This paper explores a thesis—what we call “intentionalism (about the imagination)”—that provides a way of making this evident (if vague) truism precise. According to intentionalism, the contents of your imaginings are simply determined by whatever contents you intend to imagine. Thus, for example, when you visualize a building and intend it to be of King’s College rather than a replica of (...) the college you have imagined the former rather than the latter because you intended to imagine King’s College. This is so even if the visual image you conjure up equally resembles either. This paper proposes two kinds of counterexamples to intentionalism and discusses their significance. In particular, it sketches a positive account of how many sensory imaginings get to be about what they are about, which explains how the causal history of our mental imagery can prevent us from succeeding in imagining what we intended. (shrink)

If imagination is subject to the will, in the sense that people choose the content of their own imaginings, how is it that one nevertheless can learn from what one imagines? This chapter argues for a way forward in addressing this perennial puzzle, both with respect to propositional imagination and sensory imagination. Making progress requires looking carefully at the interplay between one’s intentions and various kinds of constraints that may be operative in the generation of imaginings. Lessons are drawn (...) from the existing literature on propositional imagination and from the control theory literature concerning the prediction and comparison mechanisms (or “forward models”) involved in ordinary perception. A more general conclusion is reached that, once we have the tools to understand how some imaginings are both under willful control and helpfully guide action and inference, we will have what we need to understand the cognitive basis of imagination in general. (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)

There is a tendency to take mounted dinosaur skeletons at face value, as the raw data on which the science of paleontology is founded. But the truth is that mounted dinosaur skeletons are substantially intention-dependent—they are artifacts. More importantly, I argue, they are also substantially imagination-dependent: their production is substantially causally reliant on preparators’ creative imaginations, and their proper reception is predicated on audiences’ recreative imaginations. My main goal here is to show that dinosaur skeletal mounts are plausible candidates for (...) art-status. But, what is more, I think they are artworks—specifically, sculptures. (shrink)

If we are free to imagine what we choose, this is likely because our intentions determine what we are imagining. However, in a recent article, Munro and Strohminger (2021) argue that, in some cases of imagistic imagining, our intentions do not determine what we are imagining. They offer examples where, intuitively, a person intends to imagine one thing but, due to the causal source of the image used, imagine another. This paper acknowledges the challenge posed (...) by these cases while arguing on several grounds that, when present, intentions nevertheless always suffice to determine the object of one’s imaginings. A key claim is that, while we always imagine what we intend, we do not always imagine it as we intended. I conclude by explaining how intentions could fix the objects of episodic rememberings in much the same way as they do for imaginings, thereby bolstering the case that remembering is a kind of imagining. (shrink)

The imagination—Einbildung—as its German makes clear is the faculty of formation. But this formative activity in various ways through the history of its concept has been intimately related to the concept of common sense, whether understood as the sense that gathers, orders, and makes coherent the various sense, or as the sensibility of the community. This contribution seeks to unfold that history of the concept of the creative or productive imagination while also tracing the parallel history of the concept of (...) common sense (sensus communis) and their relationship that begins with their inception in Aristotle, a connection that has been retained implicitly in one way or another, intentionally or not, at different times—but also often forgotten—in their history and that seems again to manifest with the recent conceptions of the social imaginary. I will trace this history in the Western philosophical tradition while also making use of a couple of Japanese philosophers who take part in this intellectual history. We shall follow the history of the imagination from Aristotle through Kant’s epistemology in his first Critique—when its productive function becomes positively, rather than negatively, evaluated—and on to the post-Kantians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Post-Kantians like Schelling and Heidegger ontologize that productivity of the imagination beyond the epistemic sphere and, in a parallel fashion, broaden its significance beyond the individual and onto the collective. Common sense also has a long and parallel history within the West that involves a variety of meanings starting with the Aristotelian faculty for integrating the various senses (as koinē aisthēsis) that was closely associated with the imagination (phantasia), and ending with two contrasting notions of a communal or social sensibility (as sensus communis)—the vulgar “commonplace” notion of common sense as habituated custom and the healthy sense of common sense as prudential, contextual, ethical judgment. Both senses of common sense together with the faculty of the imagination are found in Kant’s third Critique but the imagination’s creativity expressed in genius comes into tension with the latter communal sense of common sense (Gemeinsinn) that attempts to order and fetter that creativity with the judgment of taste. The contemporary notion of the social imaginary, for example, in Castoriadis, certainly recalls the close connection between the imagination and common sense in Aristotle but also seems to encompass both the vulgar and the healthy senses of common sense along with their tension in Kant. Although Kant wanted to argue for a transcendental basis of common sense as such that would fit with his theory of the imagination from the first Critique, the imagination itself has been broadened in the third Critique, making way for post-Kantian developments, such as in its ontologization, expanding it beyond the merely epistemic as noted above. At the same time this also broadens the significance of the faculty beyond the cognizing mind of the individual and onto the social sphere to unfold what was implicit in Kant’s third Critique. In Japan Miki Kiyoshi develops that ontology of the imagination even though he still affirms its transcendental status. Nonetheless he explicates its formative creativity as involving the human collective producing not only ideal forms for thought but also institutions and technics of human culture. Likewise, Castoriadis understands the creativity of the imagination in socio-collective terms. But in addition, he underscores—in contrast to Miki—its temporal contingency or historicity and non-transcendental status. At the same time, the tension between unbounded creativity and communal responsibility found in Kant’s third Critique—together with the form-formlessness dynamic found in Miki—in a certain sense reappears in Castoriadis’ theory of the social imaginary and the creative imagination. We might say that in general the notion of Gemeinsinn in Kant in that sense provides a bridge between the idea of a creative or productive imagination and the idea of the social imaginary, while harking back to the original relationship between koinē aisthēsis and phantasia in Aristotle. This connection is implicitly assumed, perhaps unintentionally, by many of the relevant thinkers who discuss either concept. It is made explicit in contemporary Japanese philosopher Nakamura Yūjirō’s discussions of common sense, but can also be extracted out of Hannah Arendt’s discussions of the imagination, judgment, and sensus communis. Conceptually the two converge in Castoriadis’ and Ricoeur’s notions of the social imagination/imaginary. I thus plan to trace the parallel history of these two concepts (imagination and common sense). This is a chapter in the book 'Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions' edited by Suzi Adams and Jeremy Smith. (shrink)

Recent neuro-psychoanalytic literature has emphasized the view that our subjective identity rests on ancient subcortical neuro-psychic processes expressing unthinking forms of experience, which are “affectively intense without being known” (Solms and Panksepp, 2012). Devoid of internal representations, the emotional states of our “core-Self” (Panksepp, 1998b) are entirely “projected” towards the external world and tend to be discharged through instinctual action-patterns. However, due to the close connections between the subcortical and the cortical midline brain, the emotional drives may also find a (...) way to be reflected within an intrinsic self-referential processing, evident when the organism is not actively engaged with the external world. Thanks to such endogenous functioning, the core-Self emotional dispositions are not overtly executed, but they are organized within coherent dynamic mental structures, called “feeling-toned complexes” by C.G. Jung and “unconscious phantasies” by Melanie Klein. The intrinsic self-referential dynamism of the ‘brainmind’ originated from REM sleep arousal and then evolved in the resting-state activity of a complex of cortico-limbic midline brain structures (CMS), also called Default Mode Network (DMN). From our neuro-ethological perspective, it is sustained by an “introverted” SEEKING activity leading to the subjective exploration of internally constructed virtual scenarios. This “mind wandering” function, implicated in dreaming, fantasy processing, remembering and thinking, is the essence of the imaginative function and constitutes the first form of reflection, where intentions and drives gain a primordial form of conscious (but not self-conscious) representation. During postnatal development, this original (“archetypal”) imaginative function is slowly attuned in a relational “transitional” space and may be expressed first in non-verbal and eventually in abstract-verbal social communicative patterns. Our view has noticeable implications for psychotherapy. Instead of trying to directly modify interpersonal, extrinsic relationships (a top-down approach), dysfunctional emotional-relational patterns may be modified by a process in which the patient is helped to let-go of the perceived feeling-objects in favor of an immersion, via the actual feeling, from the superficial level of perception towards a void feeling-state, empty of images. Only starting from this “anoetic” feeling-state, the deep imaginal creative and re-structuring self-referential activity may be reactivated by a process of spontaneous imagination. (shrink)

In two experiments, we demonstrate that intentional action intuitions vary as a function of whether one brings about or observes an event. In experiment 1a (N?=?38), participants were less likely to judge that they intended (M?=?2.53, 7 point scale) or intentionally (M?=?2.67) brought about a harmful event compared to intention (M?=?4.16) and intentionality (M?=?4.11) judgments made about somebody else. Experiments 1b and 1c confirmed and extended this pattern of actor-observer differences. Experiment 2 suggested that these actor-observer differences are not likely (...) to occur when participants are asked to ?imagine? being an actor. We argue that these results challenge the substantial philosophical and empirical reliance on hypothetical thought examples about intentional action. Our data offer new and necessary methodological avenues for understanding folk intentional action intuitions. (shrink)

According to Mellor, we know what an experience is like if we can imagine it correctly, and we will do so if we recognise the experience as it is imagined. This paper identifies a constraint on adequate accounts of how we ordinarily imagine experiences correctly: the capacities to imagine and to recognise the experience must be jointly operative at the point of forming an intention to imagine the experience. The paper develops an account of imagining experiences (...) correctly that meets this constraint in terms of the subject's possession of a concept of the experience. The account implies that the imagination is active in conscious perception. (shrink)

We humans and other animals continuously construct and main- tain our grasp of the world by using astonishingly small snippets of sensory information. Recent studies in nonlinear brain dynamics have shown how this occurs: brains imagine possible futures and seek and use sensory stimulation to select among them as guides for chosen actions. On the one hand the scientific explanation of the dynamics is inaccessible to most of us. On the other hand the philosophical foundation from which the sciences (...) grew is accessible through the work of one of its originators, Thomas Aquinas. The core concept of intention in Aquinas is the inviolable unity of mind, brain and body. All that we know we have constructed within ourselves from the unintelligible fragments of energy impacting our senses as we move our bodies through the world. This process of intention is transi- tive in the outward thrust of the body in search of desired future states; it is intransitive in the dynamic construction of predictions of the states in the sensory cortices by which we recognize suc- cess or failure in achievement. The process is phenomenologically experienced in the action-perception cycle. Enactment is through the serial creation of neurodynamic activity patterns in brains, by which the self of mind-brain-body comes to know the world first by shaping the self to an approximation of the sought-for input, and then by assimilating those shapes into knowledge and meaning. This conception of the self as closed, autonomous, and self- organizing, devised over 700 years ago and shelved by Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza 300 years ago, is now re-emerging in philos- ophy and re-establishes the meaning of intention in its original sense. The core Aquinian concept of the unity of brain, body and soul/mind, which had been abandoned by mechanists and replaced by Brentano and Husserl using the duality inherent in representa- tionalism, has been revived by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but in phenomenological terms that are opaque to neurscientists. In my experience there is no extant philosophical system than that of Aquinas that better fits with the new _ndings in nonlinear brain dynamics. Therefore, a detailed reading and transcription of basic terms is warranted, comparing in both directions the significance of key words across 700 years from medieval metaphysics to 21st century brain dynamics. (shrink)

According to Mellor, we know what an experience is like if we can imagine it correctly, and we will do so if we recognise the experience as it is imagined. This paper identifies a constraint on adequate accounts of how we ordinarily imagine experiences correctly: the capacities to imagine and to recognise the experience must be jointly operative at the point of forming an intention to imagine the experience. The paper develops an account of imagining experiences (...) correctly that meets this constraint in terms of the subject's possession of a concept of the experience. The account implies that the imagination is active in conscious perception. (shrink)

My intention is to show that, starting from an empiricist philosophy of mind, it is possible to give a systematic account of aesthetic experience. I argue that empiricism involves a certain theory of meaning and truth; one problem is to show how this theory is compatible with the activity of aesthetic judgment. I investigate and reject two attempts to delimit the realm of the aesthetic: one in terms of the individuality of the aesthetic object, and the other in terms of (...) 'aesthetic properties'. I go on to argue that aesthetic descriptions must not be thought to ascribe properties to their objects, and I show how the suggestion that they are non-descriptive need not conflict with the empiricist view of meaning. The problem is then seen to lie with the analysis of the 'acceptance-conditions' of aesthetic descriptions. I counter certain idealist objections to this approach, and then present a theory of imagination, in terms of which the acceptance conditions of aesthetic judgments may be described. This theory attempts to explain how the element of thought in aesthetic appreciation may become inseparable from an experience of its object, and how the aesthetic emotions are both like and unlike their equivalents in life. The first part concludes with an analysis of the general conditions of aesthetic experience. I try to show that aesthetic experience can be described in terms of certain 'formal' properties, independently of its material object. In the second part I am concerned to show that this empiricist theory of aesthetics does not, like most empiricist theories, make nonsense of our appreciation of art. First, I attempt to show that 'understanding' art is not merely a cognitive process, but involves certain experiences that can be accounted for in terms of the previous theory. I then analyse the concepts of representation and expression, and in the course of this analysis I attempt to refute what I take to be the most serious rival analysis of our appreciation of art - the semantic theory. (shrink)

Drawing on his own experiences of imagining, Edward S. Casey describes the essential forms that imagination assumes in everyday life. In a detailed analysis of the fundamental features of all imaginative experience, Casey shows imagining to be eidetically distinct from perceiving and defines it as a radically autonomous act, involving a characteristic freedom of mind. A new preface places Imagining within the context of current issues in philosophy and psychology.

In Only Imagine, Kathleen Stock defends a theory of fictional content she calls extreme intentionalism. Roughly put, this view holds that the fictional content of a text is determined solely by its author’s intention. What is true in a given work of fiction gets fixed by what the author of that fiction intends a reader to imagine.

A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective impersonal laws. Asma argued that our contemporary imaginative cognition is evolutionarily conserved-it has structural and functional similarities to premodern Homo sapiens’s cognition. This article will outline the essential features of mythopoetic cognition or adaptive imagination, delineate the adaptive sociocultural advantages of mythopoetic cognition, explain the phylogenetic and ontogenetic mechanisms that give rise to human mythopoetic mind, show (...) how mythopoetic cognition challeng­es contemporary trends in cognitive science and philosophy, and recognize and outline empirical approaches for a new cognitive science of the imagination. (shrink)

In her recent book, Only Imagine, Kathleen Stock promotes extreme intentionalism with respect to fictional content. She writes, ‘the fictional content of a particular text is equivalent to exactly what the author of the text intended the reader to imagine’. There are at least three separate points here: the author’s intentions determine the fictional content; the fictional content is identical with the content of what the reader imagines; reading fiction necessarily entails imagining. The first two points are (...) normative; they are concerned with truth in fiction. The third point takes for granted that fiction necessarily involves imagining on the part of the reader; the main debates here focus on the kind of imagining that is involved in reading fiction. In the following discussion, I leave aside the normative issues marked by the first two points and concentrate on the third point—namely, the relation between fiction and imagining. (shrink)

As the editors of the series, New Literary Theory, proclaim in the preface of the book, the purpose of the series is to make more room in literary theory for playful and accessible approaches to li...

There has been an explosion of interest in “innovation-oriented knowledge” and utility in early modern knowledge economies. Despite this, a healthy skepticism surrounding the category of “useful knowledge” persists, at least in part because of its association with intentional concealment. Helpful in many ways, this skepticism has fostered a tendency to overlook a variety of efforts to teach “useful knowledge” in the period: efforts that were anchored in engagement with the real and involved the cultivation of an ability to direct (...) the powers of the imagination. Indeed, for some the imagination served as a faculty central to an epistemology of use. This article takes as its example a handbook written by an early political economist who endeavored to teach readers how to imagine uses for things they observed in collections while traveling so they would be better prepared to participate in a new, transnational culture of innovation. (shrink)

Organisms engage in various activities that are directed at objects, whether real or imagined. Such activities may be termed “intentional relations.” We present a four-level framework of social understanding that organizes the ways in which social organisms represent the intentional relations of themselves and other agents. We presuppose that the information available to an organism about its own intentional relations (or first person information) is qualitatively different from the information available to that organism about other agents’ intentional relations (or third (...) person information). However, through the integration of these two sources of information, it is possible to generate representations of intentional relations that are uniformly applicable to the activities of both self and other. The four levels of the framework differ in the extent to which such integration occurs and in the degree to which imagination is involved in generating these representations. Most animals exist at the lowest level, at which integration of first and third person sources of information does not occur. Of nonhuman species, only great apes exhibit social understanding at intermediate levels, at which integration of these sources of information provides uniform representations of intentional relations. Only humans attain the highest level, at which it is possible to represent intentional relations with mental objects. We propose that with the development of the imagination, children progress through three stages, equivalent to the later three levels of the framework. The abnormalities in social understanding of autistic individuals are hypothesized to result from a failure to develop integrated representations of intentional relations. (shrink)

Malevolence and cruelty are commonly attributed to a failure of moral reasoning or a lack of moral imagination. We present the contrasting viewpoint – immorality as an active, creative, or resourceful act. More specifically, we develop the concept of "immoral imagination" (Jacobs, 1991) and explore how it can enter into Rest's (1986) four processes of decision making: sensitivity, judgment, intention, and implementation. The literature on revenge and workplace deviance illustrates these processes.

It is common to talk about options, where an option is a course of action an agent can take. A course of action, in turn, is that which can be the object of intention. It has not often been noticed in the literature, though, that there are two ways to understand what makes something an option: first, an option just is some course of action physically open (or, to be maximally liberal, logically open) to an agent; second, an option just (...) is some course of action that the agent either in fact deliberates about taking or is psychologically capable of deliberating about taking. At any given time, there are far more courses of action open to an agent than the agent can or does deliberate about taking. What determines which courses of action an agent deliberates about as an option, and why do so many other courses of action remain out of deliberative view? I argue that while values, ends, the demands of both means-end coherence and consistency of beliefs contribute to the determination of which courses of action an agent sees as options, they cannot be the whole story. I argue that another mechanism, which I call the practical imagination, is primarily responsible for which courses of action an agent sees as options. Drawing upon both recent work in developmental and social psychology and a strain of philosophical argument that has attempted to show how human beings have a practical understanding of themselves that is mediated by what we can call a narrative identity, I argue that the norms governing the construction of a narrative identity are among the most important, albeit not the only, norms governing the practical imagination and that, just as we should look to the norms of practical reason to explain and critically reflect on practical deliberation, we should look to the norms of practical imagination to explain and critically reflect on the process by which an agent comes to see some course of action as an option. (shrink)

I present a formal theory of the logic and aboutness of imagination. Aboutness is understood as the relation between meaningful items and what they concern, as per Yablo and Fine’s works on the notion. Imagination is understood as per Chalmers’ positive conceivability: the intentional state of a subject who conceives that p by imagining a situation—a configuration of objects and properties—verifying p. So far aboutness theory has been developed mainly for linguistic representation, but it is natural to extend it to (...) intentional states. The proposed framework combines a modal semantics with a mereology of contents: imagination operators are understood as variably strict quantifiers over worlds with a content-preservation constraint. (shrink)

Detecting conscious awareness in a patient emerging from a coma state is problematic, because our standard attributions of conscious awareness rely on interpreting bodily movement as intentional action. Where there is an absence of intentional bodily action, as in the vegetative state, can we reliably assume that there is an absence of conscious awareness? Recent neuroimaging work suggests that we can attribute conscious awareness to some patients in a vegetative state by interpreting their brain activity as intentional mental action. I (...) suggest that this change of focus, from the interpretation of motor behaviour as intentional bodily action to the interpretation of neural activity as intentional mental action, raises philosophical issues that affect the interpretation of the neuroimaging data. (shrink)

Both local and global issues are typically dealt with in the Social Studies curriculum, or in curriculum areas with other names but similar intents. In the literature about Social Studies the imagination has played little role, and consequently it hardly appears in texts designed to help teachers plan and implement Social Studies lessons. What is true of Social Studies is also largely reflected in general texts concerning planning teaching. Clearly many theorists and practitioners are concerned to engage students' imaginations in (...) learning, even though they use terms other than 'imagination' in doing so. This article suggests that a more explicit attention to imagination can make our efforts to engage students in learning more effective. We provide, first, a working definition of imagination, then show how students' imaginations can be characterized in terms of the 'cognitive toolkits' they bring to learning. We look at such 'cognitive tools' as stories, images, humor, binary oppositions, a sense of mystery and how these can be used to engage students' imaginations in learning Social Studies and other content from kindergarten to about grade four. We then consider 'cognitive tools' commonly deployed by students from about grade four to grade nine, including a sense of reality, the extremes of experience and limits of reality, and associating with the heroic. We also provide examples of how using such tools could influence planning and teaching Social Studies topics. (shrink)

Sometimes, a proposition is fictional in a story in virtue of the fact that other fictional truths are good evidence for it. Cases are presented in which this evidential rule, and not some rule that invokes counterfactuals or intentions, is what explains what is fictional. Applications are made to the question of interpretive pluralism and the problem of imaginative resistance. In the background is pluralism about fictionality: the evidential rule is one of a variety of rules that are needed (...) to account for what is fictional in a story. (shrink)

Imagining A Phenomenological Study Second Edition Edward S. Casey A classic firsthand account of the lived character of imaginative experience. "This scrupulous, lucid study is destined to become a touchstone for all future writings on imagination." —Library Journal "Casey’s work is doubly valuable—for its major substantive contribution to our understanding of a significant mental activity, as well as for its exemplary presentation of the method of phenomenological analysis." —Contemporary Psychology "... an important addition to phenomenological philosophy and to the humanities (...) generally." —Choice "... deliberately and consistently phenomenological, oriented throughout to the basically intentional character of experience and disciplined by the requirement of proceeding by way of concrete description.... [Imagining] is an exceptionally well-written work." —International Philosophical Quarterly Drawing on his own experiences of imagining, Edward S. Casey describes the essential forms that imagination assumes in everyday life. In a detailed analysis of the fundamental features of all imaginative experience, Casey shows imagining to be eidetically distinct from perceiving and defines it as a radically autonomous act, involving a characteristic freedom of mind. A new preface places Imagining within the context of current issues in philosophy and psychology. [use one Casey bio for both Imagining and Remembering] Edward S. Casey is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is author of Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World and The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Studies in Continental Thought—John Sallis, general editor Contents Preface to the Second Edition Introduction The Problematic Place of Imagination Part One: Preliminary Portrait Examples and First Approximations Imagining as Intentional Part Two Detailed Descriptions Spontaneity and Controlledness Self-Containedness and Self-Evidence Indeterminacy and Pure Possibility Part Three: Phenomenological Comparisons Imagining and Perceiving: Continuities Imagining and Perceiving: Discontinuities Part Four: The Autonomy of Imagining The Nature of Imaginative Autonomy The Significance of Imaginative Autonomy. (shrink)

Right brain-damaged patients with unilateral neglect, who ignore left-sided visual events, may also omit left-sided details when describing known places from memory. Modulating the orienting of visual attention may ameliorate imaginal neglect. A first step toward explaining these phenomena might be to postulate that space-related imagery is a cognitive activity involving attentional and intentional aspects.

There is a sense in which it is trivial to say that one accepts intention- (or convention-) based semantics.[2] For if what is meant by this claim is simply that there is an important respect in which words and sentences have meaning (either at all or the particular meanings that they have in any given natural language) due to the fact that they are used, in the way they are, by intentional agents (i.e. speakers), then it seems no one should (...) disagree. For imagine a possible world where there are physical things which share the shape and form of words of English or Japanese, or the acoustic properties of sentences of Finnish or Arapaho, yet where there are no intentional agents (or where any remaining intentional agents don’t use language). In such a world, it seems clear that these physical objects, which are only superficially language-like, will lack all meaning. Furthermore, it seems that questions of particular meaning are also settled by the conventions of intentional language users: it’s nothing more than convention which makes the concatenation of letters ‘a’^‘p’^‘p’^‘l’^‘e’ mean apple, rather than banana, in English.[3] So, understood as the minimal claim that intentional agents, who have a practice of using certain physical objects (written words, sounds, hand gestures, etc) to communicate certain thoughts, are a prerequisite for linguistic meaning, the idea that semantics is based on both intention and convention seems indisputable. I will label a theory which recognises this preconditional role for speaker intentions an A-style intention-based semantics and we will explore one such account in §1. (shrink)

Kathleen Stock’s engaging and careful book demonstrates that ‘extreme intentionalism’ – the view that a fiction’s content is determined by what its author actually intended – has for too long been held back by a set of familiar objections.1 1 It is often thought to have implausible consequences involving disregarding conventional meaning, permitting undetectable fictional content, denying that authorial intentions can be unsuccessful, or giving too much importance to extraneous indications of intention and too little to the work itself. (...) All these objections, Stock argues, are overplayed, all are answerable, and several ultimately favour extreme intentionalism over its rivals. Stock’s defence of extreme intentionalism grounds a view of imaginative resistance, an account of the fiction/non-fiction distinction and of what an individual fiction is, and a characterization of propositional imagining and of the nature of supposition. (shrink)

"My argument is as follows. In the first section, I sketch briefly the ways in which intentionalism might provide a solution to the problem of vagueness. The second section describes the different areas in which counterfactuals must be invoked by intentionalism. In the third section I point out that on a classic analysis of counterfactuals - that of David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker - the truth conditions of counterfactuals depend on relations of similarity among possible worlds. Since similarity is vague, (...) so are counterfactuals. Finally, I show that there is no unique solution to the problem of vagueness for the specific types of counterfactuals required by intentionalists - those referring to authors' or legislators' mental states, and those attempting to transport historical authors into the present. Although some counterfactuals are relatively 'insensitive' - in Lewis's sense -- those required in intentionalist interpretation are at least moderately sensitive. This means taht different contexts will resolve the vagueness in different ways. The choice among contexts must be made by the interpreter and is not determined by author's intentions. Hence the vagueness due to counterfactual reasoning about author's intention leads to indeterminacies that cannot be resolved by intentionalism itself. Intentionalism is a solution neither to the problem of vagueness nor to the problem of indeterminacy." Distinguishes between strict intentionalism and moderate intentionalism. Both are often seen as a means for reducing vagueness in legal language. However, counterfactual intentions are needed to resolve certain problems. First, in combining actual intentions, e.g. in a legislature, where different combinations may result in different legislation. Second, it is needed to resolve conflicts between intentions, particularly between different levels of abstraction. Third, reducing vagueness, which will be necessary even with enactment intentions. Fourth, there may be no determinate intention that would even, in principle, resolve a borderline case - e.g. when intentions are conflated. [For discussion of application and enactment intentions, see Goldsworthy, "Originalism in Constitutional Interpretation," Federal Law Review 25: 1.] Lastly, counterfactuals may be necessary to distinguish between application and enactment intentions. Lewis on counterfactuals: "For Lewis and Stalnaker, the key idea in the explication of truth conditions of counterfactuals is that of 'comparative overall similarity' of possible worlds. A counterfactual is true if and only if in the closest, most similar world to the actual in which the antecedent of the conditional is true, the consequent of the conditional is also true." Thus, there may be a determinate relevant world for some cases - i.e. there may be a counterfactual that determines the answer to a counterfactual question. This, however, will not always be the case. For example, counterfactuals concerning Caesar being the leader of N. Korea. Here, for Lewis, where there are ties of closeness of counterfactuals, all tied CFs will be false. When considering counterfactual intentions for the sake of interpretation, some may be determinate or insensitive. Normally, however, this will not be the case. "For intentionalism to resolve the matter of whether the regulation prohibiting vehicles prohibits toy cars as well, one of these counterfactuals must be true and the other false. Imagine a possible world in which the oncsideration of the borderline case is added to the authors' mental states. It is likely that connected belief will be affected as well. For example consideration of the aim of the regulation will occur as a consequence of the consideration of whether the regulation applies to the borderline case: Is ensuring peace and quiet in the park overriding, or are there exceptions to accommodate children's games? When there are changes in a constellation of men tal states, we will have to imagine a situation in whichh the legislators' beleifs are very different from what they in fact were. This creates at least a profound epistemological problem, because, as Dworkin puts it: "[it] has the effect of sharply reducing the amount of historical evidence that is relevant to answering the counterfactual." More important, however, in some worlds in which the legislators consider the case of a child's toy car, they will treat the peace and quiet purpose as overriding, whereas in others they will treat the children's play purpose as overriding. This means that different worlds will resolve the truth-value of the counterfactuals differently." "If I am right that counterfactual reasoning is ubiquitous in intentionalism, intentionalism suffers from an extra dimension of vagueness and is therefore at a disadvantage when measured against theories that do not rely on counterfactuals.". (shrink)

With the advent of the digital age and new mediums of communication, it is becoming increasingly important for those interested in the interpretation of religious text to look beyond traditional ideas of text and textuality to find the sacred in unlikely places. Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological reorientation of classical hermeneutics from romanticized notions of authorial intent and psychological divinations to a serious engagement with the “science of the text” is a hermeneutical tool that opens up an important dialogue between the interpreter, (...) the world of the text, and the contemporary world in front of the text. This article examines three significant insights that Paul Ricoeur contributes to our expanding understanding of text. First under scrutiny will be Ricoeur’s de-regionalization of classic hermeneutics culminating in his understanding of Dasein (Being) as “being-in-the-world,” allowing mean-ing to transcend the physical boundaries of the text. Next, Ricoeur’s three-fold under-standing of traditionality/Traditions/tradition as the “chain of interpretations” through which religious language transcends the tem-poral boundary of historicity will be explored. The final section will focus on Ricoeur’s understanding of the productive imagination and metaphoric truth as the under-appreciated yet key insight around which Ricoeur’s philosophical investigation into the metaphoric transfer from text to life revolves. (shrink)

This article explores the importance of imagination and art when developing and working with theology, particularly feminist theology. It begins with a short review of selected periods in Christian history that either supported or warned against the use of imagination and art in classical theological development. Feminist theology has had a different history because since its inception, imagination has been central to the formation and exploration of the field. Imagination and art have continued to develop and promote feminist theological worship, (...) and backlash against feminist theology has also focused on these artistic expressions. I propose the term theological imaginizing for the intentional engagement and exploration of imagination and art with theology, and I share insights based on my field research for integrating feminist theology with art in Christian worship today. (shrink)

Participants in the cognitive phenomenology debate have proceeded by (a) proposing a bifurcation of theoretical options into inflationary and non-inflationary theories, and then (b) providing arguments for/against one of these theories. I suggest that this method has failed to illuminate the commonalities and differences among conscious intentional states of different types, in the absence of a theory of the structure of these states. I propose such a theory. In perception, phenomenal-intentional properties combine with somatosensory properties to form P-I property clusters (...) that serve as phenomenal modes of presentations of particulars. In imagination, somatosensory properties are replaced with phenomenal-intentional properties whose intentional objects are somatosensory properties, thus resulting in imaginative facsimiles of perceptual P-I property clusters. Such structures can then be used as phenomenal prototypes that pick out individuals and kinds. Sets of such prototypes constitute a subject’s conception of individuals and kinds. Combined with a few additional elements, these imaginative P-I property clusters serve as the building-blocks of conscious cognitive states. Different ways of carving up theoretical space classify my theory either as inflationary or as non-inflationary. I conclude that the theory is anti-inflationary in letter but inflationary in spirit. (shrink)

Abstract:Moral imagination is a reasoning process thought to counter the organizational factors that corrupt ethical judgment. We describe the psychology of moral imagination as composed of the four decision processes identified by Rest (1986), i.e., moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral intention, and moral behavior. We examine each process in depth, distilling extant psychological research and indicating organizational implications. The conclusion offers suggestions for future research.The majority of men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others—terribly objective sometimes—but the real (...) task is in fact to be objective toward one’s self and subjective toward all others. (shrink)

Both local and global issues are typically dealt with in the Social Studies curriculum, or in curriculum areas with other names but similar intents. In the literature about Social Studies the imagination has played little role, and consequently it hardly appears in texts designed to help teachers plan and implement Social Studies lessons. What is true of Social Studies is also largely reflected in general texts concerning planning teaching. Clearly many theorists and practitioners are concerned to engage students’ imaginations in (...) learning, even though they use terms other than ‘imagination’ in doing so. This article suggests that a more explicit attention to imagination can make our efforts to engage students in learning more effective. We provide, first, a working definition of imagination, then show how students’ imaginations can be characterized in terms of the ‘cognitive toolkits’ they bring to learning. We look at such ‘cognitive tools’ as stories, images, humor, binary oppositions, a sense of mystery and how these can be used to engage students’ imaginations in learning Social Studies and other content from kindergarten to about grade four. We then consider ‘cognitive tools’ commonly deployed by students from about grade four to grade nine, including a sense of reality, the extremes of experience and limits of reality, and associating with the heroic. We also provide examples of how using such tools could influence planning and teaching Social Studies topics. (shrink)

The purpose and conclusions of Sartre’s analysis of imagination are remarkably similar to Ryle’s. Like Ryle, Sartre is intent on rebutting image-theories of imagination—those theories which claim that to imagine anything is to be aware of a private mental image, which exists in its own right, has its own properties and relations and which can, as a result, be distinguished as a separate entity from the things of which it is an image. Sartre’s argument against image-theories of imagination leads (...) him to a conclusion very similar to Ryle’s. Sartre concludes that imagining and perceiving are not to be distinguished by reference to the objects which these activities take. We cannot say, Sartre maintains, that imagining and perceiving are similar activities which differ only by virtue of the fact that imagining takes an object different in kind from the object of perception. For Sartre, just as for Ryle, there are no objects other than the objects of perception. Thus he concludes, like Ryle, that imagining and perceiving can only be distinguished by reference to these activities themselves. Imagining and perceiving, Sartre contends, are two mutually exclusive activities, directed at the same objects—viz. at the objects of perception. (shrink)

Starting from the assumption that decision situations in economic contexts are characterized by fundamental uncertainty, this article argues that the decision-making of intentionally rational actors is anchored in fictions. “Fictionality” in economic action is the inhabitation in the mind of an imagined future state of the world and the beliefs in causal mechanisms leading to this future state. Actors are motivated in their actions by the imagined future and organize their activities based on these mental representations. Since these representations are (...) not confined to empirical reality, fictional expectations are also a source of creativity in the economy. Fictionality opens up a way to an understanding of the microfoundations of the dynamics of the economy. The article develops the notion of fictional expectations. It discusses the role of fictional expectations for the dynamics of the economy and addresses the question of how fictional expectations motivate action. The last part relates the notion of fiction to calculation and social macrostructures, especially institutions and cultural frames. The conclusion hints at the research program developing from the concept of fictional expectations. (shrink)

What does it mean to study places in ‘crisis’ and how does that affect the research done on the ‘rural’? To be considered to be in crisis is not really new as any literature review of rural studies indicates. And yet, we live now in a new context, with new challenges for ‘rural’ research, in particular that of sustainability. Sustainability is the new policy focus and is increasingly reflected in research on rural Europe. Although scholars are beginning to theorize on (...) what is sustainable in and for rural areas, our intention is to take this further. We theorize on what the focus on crisis and, increasingly on sustainability, means for the research we do and the knowledge we produce on rural Europe. Our aim is to bring attention to the politics of past and present knowledge production on the rural to be able to imagine just and sustainable futures. In an analysis of literature primarily from Sweden and the UK, we argue that two construals, that of a rural crisis and that of rural–urban polarization, have set the tone for rural studies and may have overshadowed a more plural approach. We outline what might be needed from rural research to meet future challenges and what the notion of sustainability, with its emphasis on the entanglements of the social, economic and environmental, might mean for the future of rural research. (shrink)

Excerpt from Custom an Essay on Social Codes Still a professor extraordinarius and thus not en cumbered with the time-consuming duties of an Ordinarius (a full professor), T onnies was living in the small town of Eutin, about an hour's ride on the train to Kiel, the seat of his university, and engaged in a prolific literary and scholarly pro duction on a great variety of theoretical as well as practical sociological, political and economic prob lems. Most of his articles (...) were intended for an edu cated though not professional public of people in terested in fundamental questions of social life or in social problems of the day. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Two particular approaches to the imagination as a recreative capacity have recently gained prominence: neo-Humeanism and simulationatism. According to neo-Humeanism, imaginings have cognitions as a constitutive part of their representational contents; while simulationalists maintain that, in imagining, we essentially simulate the occurrence of certain cognitive states. Two other kinds of constitutive dependence, that figure regularly in the debate, concern the necessity of cogni­tions for, respectively, the causation and the semantic power of imaginings. In what follows, I dis­cuss each of these (...) kinds of dependence and assess how useful they are for spelling out the concep­tion of imaginings as recreations of cognitions. A particular focus will thereby be on the details of Hume's original conception of imaginings as causal reproductions (or ‘copies’) of cog­nitions, as well as on the influence of his view on contemporary approaches to the topic which replace Hume's causal understanding of the representational link between imaginings and cognitions with either an intentional or a relational understanding. My conclusion will be that, if imaginings should be taken to be recreations at all, then they should be taken to be representational recreations. That is, neo-Humeanism turns out to be the most plausible way of understanding imaginings as re­creations of cognitions. (shrink)

This article is an explication and defense of Kant’s view that ‘imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself’ (Critique of Pure Reason, A120, fn.). Imagination comes into perception at a far more basic level than Strawson allows, and it is required for the constitution of intuitions (= sense experiences) out of sense impressions. It also plays an important part in explaining how it is possible for intuitions to have intentional contents. These functions do not involve the application of contents, (...) and I offer a schematic account of how they arise from preconceptual synthesis. (shrink)

The relationship between an author's and an audience's intentions is complex but need not preclude mutual engagement. This philosophical investigation challenges existing literary and rhetorical perspectives on intention and offers a new framework for understanding the negotiation of meaning. It describes how an audience's intentions affect their interpretations, shows how audiences negotiate meaning when faced with a writer's undecipherable intentions, and defines the scope of understanding within rhetorical situations. Introducing a concept of intention into literary analysis that (...) supersedes existing rhetorical theory, Arabella Lyon shows how the rhetorics of I. A. Richards, Wayne Booth, and Stanley Fish, as well as the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, fail to account for the complex interactions of author and audience. Using Kenneth Burke's concepts of form, motive, and purpose, she builds a more complex notion of intention than those usually found in literary studies, then employs her theory to describe how philosophers read Wittgenstein's narratives, metaphors, and reversals in argument. Lyon argues that our differences in intention prevent consistency in interpretations but do not stop our discussions, deliberations, and actions. She seeks to acknowledge difference and the communicative problems it creates while demonstrating that difference is normal and does not end our engagement with each other. _Intentions_ combines recent work in philosophy, literary criticism, hermeneutics, and rhetoric in a highly imaginative way to construct a theory of intention for a postmodern rhetoric. It recovers and renovates central concepts in rhetorical theory—not only intention but also deliberation, politics, and judgment. (shrink)

The relationship between an author's and an audience's intentions is complex but need not preclude mutual engagement. This philosophical investigation challenges existing literary and rhetorical perspectives on intention and offers a new framework for understanding the negotiation of meaning. It describes how an audience's intentions affect their interpretations, shows how audiences negotiate meaning when faced with a writer's undecipherable intentions, and defines the scope of understanding within rhetorical situations. Introducing a concept of intention into literary analysis that (...) supersedes existing rhetorical theory, Arabella Lyon shows how the rhetorics of I. A. Richards, Wayne Booth, and Stanley Fish, as well as the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, fail to account for the complex interactions of author and audience. Using Kenneth Burke's concepts of form, motive, and purpose, she builds a more complex notion of intention than those usually found in literary studies, then employs her theory to describe how philosophers read Wittgenstein's narratives, metaphors, and reversals in argument. Lyon argues that our differences in intention prevent consistency in interpretations but do not stop our discussions, deliberations, and actions. She seeks to acknowledge difference and the communicative problems it creates while demonstrating that difference is normal and does not end our engagement with each other. _Intentions_ combines recent work in philosophy, literary criticism, hermeneutics, and rhetoric in a highly imaginative way to construct a theory of intention for a postmodern rhetoric. It recovers and renovates central concepts in rhetorical theory—not only intention but also deliberation, politics, and judgment. (shrink)

We know, since Descartes (1641), that exercises of sensory imagining (S-imagining) are not purely imagistic: they possess multiple aspects. This much is agreed upon among philosophers but, when the question of the intentionality of S-imaginings arises, agreement seems to unravel. -/- According to the Two Content View (TCV), S-imagining “has two kinds of content, qualitative content and assigned content” (Kung, 2010:632) – e.g., my image of an apple is about both (i) shapes and colors and (ii) about the fact that (...) it is an apple, rather than a perfect imitation thereof. Advocates of TCV claim that the imagistic content does represent something, but it is not enough to individuate the imagining of an A rather than a B (Kung, 2010; Langland-Hassan, 2015; Martin, 2002; Noordhof, 2002; Peacocke, 1985; Tooming, 2018; White, 1990). -/- Some, however, have expressed skepticism about TCV. As Sartre claims, “despite some prejudices […] when I produce in myself the image of Pierre, it is Pierre who is the object of my current consciousness.” (1940/2010:4) The intentional object of our S-imaginings is exhausted by a single content treated in a specific way (Currie & Ravenscroft, 2002; Goldman, 2006; Hutto, 2015; Mulligan, 1999; Soteriou, 2013; Stock, n.d.; Wiltsher, 2016,2019). -/- In the following, (1) I sketch one of the most efficient pleas for the TCV by Peter Langland-Hassan, (2) I give two reasons to doubt the decisiveness of his arguments, and (3) suggest that S-imagining can be captured by the attitude/content distinction. (shrink)

Immediate imitation is likely to be a major, direct input to Barresi & Moore's level 2 competence, but deferred imitation is unlikely to play a key role in the transition to level 3, because (1) the attribution of first person knowledge is neither a necessary cause nor an obvious consequence of deferred imitation, and (2) deferred imitation does not correlate phylogenetically with capacities that more plausibly either yield or reflect a concept of intentional agency.

Susan Babbitt dissects a common moral perspective for judging importance which she calls 'moral imagination.' In order to explain ourselves, and to recognize in others, what we often already perceive intuitively to be right or good, we instinctively create a story as a framework. She argues that we intentionally create stories which appear artless or chaotic, something capable of imperfection. This allows the story-maker to eventually deviate if he or she chooses, without a loss of hope, even if that direction (...) and goal may not yet be able to be fully articulated or defended. (shrink)