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  1. Embodied simulation and knowledge of possibilities.Max Jones & Tom Schoonen - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
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  • A Powers Framework for Mental Action.Seth Goldwasser - 2024 - Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh
    Mental actions are things we do with our minds. Consider inferring, deliberating, imagining, remembering, calculating, and so on. I introduce a non-reductive alternative to standard causalist accounts of mental action that understands such action in terms of dispositions for performing mental actions. I call this alternative the powers framework. On the powers framework, habitual and skillful mental actions are themselves infused with practical intelligence by being expressions of the agent’s rational tendencies and capacities, respectively. The intelligence exemplified in the performance (...)
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  • Imagining as a Skillful Mental Action.Seth Goldwasser - 2024 - Synthese 204 (38):1-33.
    I provide a novel, non-reductive, action-first skill-based account of active imagining. I call it the Skillful Action Account of Imagining (the skillful action account for short). According to this account, to actively imagine something is to form a representation of that thing, where the agent’s forming that representation and selecting its content together constitute a means to the completion of some imaginative project. Completing imaginative projects stands to the active formation of the relevant representations as an end. The account thus (...)
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  • Imagination as a source of empirical justification.Joshua Myers - 2024 - Philosophy Compass 19 (3):e12969.
    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.
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  • Going ballistic: The dynamics of the imagination and the issue of intentionalism.Felipe Morales Carbonell - 2024 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 5.
    Do we have control over the content of our imaginings? More precisely: do we have control over what our imaginings are about? Intentionalists say yes. Until recently, intentionalism could be taken as the received view. Recently, authors like Munro & Strohminger (2021) have developed some arguments against it. Here, I tentatively join their ranks and develop a new way to think about the way in which imaginings develop their contents that also goes against intentionalism. My proposal makes use of what (...)
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  • Imaginative Beliefs.Joshua Myers - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue for the existence of imaginative beliefs: mental states that are imaginative in format and doxastic in attitude. I advance two arguments for this thesis. First, there are imaginings that play the functional roles of belief. Second, there are imaginings that play the epistemic roles of belief. These arguments supply both descriptive and normative grounds for positing imaginative beliefs. I also argue that this view fares better than alternatives that posit distinct imaginative and doxastic states to account for the (...)
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  • The Epistemic Role of Vividness.Joshua Myers - forthcoming - Analysis.
    The vividness of mental imagery is epistemically relevant. Intuitively, vivid and intense memories are epistemically better than weak and hazy memories, and using a clear and precise mental image in the service of spatial reasoning is epistemically better than using a blurry and imprecise mental image. But how is vividness epistemically relevant? I argue that vividness is higher-order evidence about one’s epistemic state, rather than first-order evidence about the world. More specifically, the vividness of a mental image is higher-order evidence (...)
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  • How Imagination Informs.Joshua Myers - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    An influential objection to the epistemic power of the imagination holds that it is uninformative. You cannot get more out of the imagination than you put into it, and therefore learning from the imagination is impossible. This paper argues, against this view, that the imagination is robustly informative. Moreover, it defends a novel account of how the imagination informs, according to which the imagination is informative in virtue of its analog representational format. The core idea is that analog representations represent (...)
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  • The Eidetics of the Unimaginable. What a Phenomenologist can Learn from Ethnomethodology.Christian Ferencz-Flatz - 2023 - Human Studies 46 (3):467-485.
    This paper discusses the phenomenological method’s reliance on imaginative procedures in view of ethnomethodological research. While ethnomethodology has often been seen in continuity with Alfred Schütz’ phenomenological sociology, it mainly parts ways with phenomenology by stressing that the decisive details structuring mutual understanding (gestures, bodily expressions, or the myriad trifles that regulate casual conversation) are „not imaginable, but can only be found out”. This paper reflects from a phenomenological perspective on what such a claim entails by first delineating this line (...)
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  • Imagination as a generative source of justification.Kengo Miyazono & Uku Tooming - forthcoming - Noûs.
    One of the most exciting debates in philosophy of imagination in recent years has been over the epistemic use of imagination where imagination epistemically contributes to justifying beliefs and acquiring knowledge. This paper defends “generationism about imagination” according to which imagination is a generative source, rather than a preservative source, of justification. In other words, imagination generates new justification above and beyond prior justification provided by other sources. After clarifying the generation/preservation distinction (Section 2), we present an argument for generationism (...)
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  • Scientific Models and Thought Experiments: Same Same but Different.Rawad El Skaf & Michael T. Stuart - forthcoming - In Rawad El Skaf & Michael T. Stuart (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling. London: Routledge.
    The philosophical literatures on models and thought experiments have been developing exponentially, and independently, for decades. This independence is surprising, given how similar models and thought experiments are. They each have “lives of their own,” they sit between theory and experience, they are important for both pedagogy and cutting-edge science, they galvanize conceptual changes and paradigm shifts, and they involve entertaining imaginary scenarios and working out what happens. Recently, philosophers have begun to highlight these similarities. This entry aims at taking (...)
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  • Scientific counterfactuals as make-believe.Noelia Iranzo-Ribera - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6).
    Counterfactuals abound in science, especially when reasoning about and with models. This often requires entertaining counterfactual conditionals with nomologically or metaphysically impossible antecedents, namely, counternomics or counterpossibles. In this paper I defend the make-believe view of scientific counterfactuals, a naturalised fiction-based account of counterfactuals in science which provides a means to evaluate their meanings independently of the possibility of the states of affairs their antecedents describe, and under which they have non-trivial truth-values. Fiction is here understood as imagination (in contrast (...)
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  • The epistemic imagination revisited.Arnon Levy & Ori Kinberg - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (2):319-336.
    Recently, various philosophers have argued that we can obtain knowledge via the imagination. In particular, it has been suggested that we can come to know concrete, empirical matters of everyday significance by appropriately imagining relevant scenarios. Arguments for this thesis come in two main varieties: black box reliability arguments and constraints-based arguments. We suggest that both strategies are unsuccessful. Against black-box arguments, we point to evidence from empirical psychology, question a central case-study, and raise concerns about a (claimed) evolutionary rationale (...)
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  • Imagination constrained, imagination constructed.Christopher Gauker - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (1):485-512.
    A number of authors have asked what it takes for a course of mental imagery to be epistemically or practically useful. This paper addresses a prior question, namely, the difference between courses of imagination that are realistic and those that are fantastic. One approach, suggested by recent literature concerning the utility of imagery, holds that a course of imagination represents realistically if and only if the course of events represented conforms to certain accepted constraints. Against this it will be argued (...)
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  • The Rationality of Perception : Replies to Lord, Railton, and Pautz.Susanna Siegel - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3):764-771.
    My replies to Errol Lord, Adam Pautz, and Peter Railton's commentaries on The Rationality of Perception (2017).
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  • Imagine This: Opaque DLMs are Reliable in the Context of Justification.Logan Carter - manuscript
    Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models have undoubtedly become useful tools in science. In general, scientists and ML developers are optimistic – perhaps rightfully so – about the potential that these models have in facilitating scientific progress. The philosophy of AI literature carries a different mood. The attention of philosophers remains on potential epistemological issues that stem from the so-called “black box” features of ML models. For instance, Eamon Duede (2023) argues that opacity in deep learning models (DLMs) (...)
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  • The Justificatory Power of Memory Experience.Lu Teng - 2024 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 5.
    Psychological research has discovered that episodic memories are constructive in nature. This paper examines how, despite being constructive, episodic memories can provide us with justification for beliefs about the past. In current literature, two major approaches to memorial justification are internalist foundationalism and reliabilism. I first demonstrate that an influential version of internalist foundationalism, dogmatism, encounters problems when we compare certain types of memory construction with cognitive penetration in perception. On the other hand, various versions of reliabilism all face skeptical (...)
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  • Longings in Limbo: A New Defence of I-Desires.Luke Roelofs - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (8):3331-3355.
    This paper responds to two arguments that have been offered against the positing of ‘i-desires’, imaginative counterparts of desire supposedly involved in fiction, pretence, and mindreading. The Introspection Argument asks why, if there are both i-desires and desires, the distinction is so unfamiliar and hard to draw, unlike the relatively clear distinctions between perception and mental imagery, or belief and belief-like imagining. The Accountability Argument asks how it can make sense to treat merely imaginative states as revealing of someone’s psychology, (...)
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  • Remembering is an Imaginative Project.Seth Goldwasser - 2024 - Philosophical Studies:1-37.
    This essay defends the claim that episodic remembering is a mental action by arguing that episodic remembering and sensory- or experience-like imagining are of a kind in a way relevant for agency. Episodic remembering is a type of imaginative project that involves the agential construction of imagistic-content and that aims at (veridically) representing particular events of the personal past. Neurally intact adults under normal conditions can token experiential memories of particular events from the personal past (merely) by intending or trying (...)
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  • From Altered States to Metaphysics: The Epistemic Status of Psychedelic-induced Metaphysical Beliefs.Paweł Gładziejewski - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-23.
    Psychedelic substances elicit powerful, uncanny conscious experiences that are thought to possess therapeutic value. In those who undergo them, these altered states of consciousness often induce shifts in metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental structure of reality. The contents of those beliefs range from contentious to bizarre, especially when considered from the point of view of naturalism. Can chemically induced, radically altered states of consciousness provide reasons for or play some positive epistemic role with respect to metaphysical beliefs? In this paper, (...)
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  • Imagination Cannot Generate Empirical Justification or Knowledge.Jonathan Egeland - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.
    What is the epistemic function of imagination? Traditionally, philosophers have claimed that the epistemic function of imagination is exhausted by its ability to provide justification for modal beliefs, or that it is epistemically irrelevant. However, in recent years a number of philosophers have broken with the tradition by arguing that imagination can generate justification or knowledge about contingent empirical facts. This paper argues against this view by developing a new dilemma. The upshot of the argument is that although imagination does (...)
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