The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine critically and discuss the role of imagination in science and religion, with particular emphasis on its possible epistemic, creative, and meaning-making functions. In order to answer my research questions, I apply theories and concepts from contemporary philosophy of mind on scientific and religious practices. This framework allows me to explore the mental state of imagination, not as an isolated phenomenon but, rather, as one of many mental states that co-exist and interplay (...) in our cogntive architecture. Based on the philosophical discourse of philosophy of mind, four types of imagination are indentified and conceptualized: sensory, propositional, experiential, and creative imagination. These categories are then employed on five phenomena that can be found in scientific and religious environments: metaphors, models, thought experiments, aspect perception, and - in the religious case - rituals. In relation to the concept of religious "seeing" I consider how imaginings may influence visionary experiences and visualization, and compare these phenomena with cases of scientific visualization and eureka experiences. In regard to scientific and religious models, a distinction is made between, on the one hand, two notions of truth and, on the other hand, truth-independent meaning-making. In light of these categories, I differentiate between, and critically discuss, the use of imagination in doxastic, non-doxastic and fictionalist accounts. In light of this investigation, I formulate and defend the position of interactivism, which acknowledges a constant interplay between different attitudes and mental states. In my examination of rituals and scientific and religious thought experiments, special attention is given to the mental capacity to recreate the experiences that are entailed in an imagined scenario. At the end of the investigation, I consider the possible impact that my study might have on how we view science and religion as well as the dialogue bewteen these two fields. (shrink)

When we evaluate moral agents, we consider many factors, including whether the agent acted freely, or under duress or coercion. In turn, moral evaluations have been shown to influence our (non-moral) evaluations of these same factors. For example, when we judge an agent to have acted immorally, we are subsequently more likely to judge the agent to have acted freely, not under force. Here, we investigate the cognitive signatures of this effect in interpersonal situations, in which one agent (“forcer”) forces (...) another agent (“forcee”) to act either immorally or morally. The structure of this relationship allowed us to ask questions about both the “forcer” and the “forcee.” Paradoxically, participants judged that the “forcer” forced the “forcee” to act immorally (i.e. X forced Y), but that the “forcee” was not forced to act immorally (i.e. Y was not forced by X). This pattern obtained only for human agents who acted intentionally. Directly changing participants’ focus from one agent to another (forcer vs. forcee) also changed the target of moral evaluation and therefore force attributions. The full pattern of judgments may provide a window into motivated moral reasoning and focusing bias more generally; participants may have been motivated to attribute greater force to the immoral forcer and greater freedom to the immoral forcee. (shrink)

Three experiments demonstrated that decisions resulting in considerable amounts of profit, but missed alternative outcomes of greater profits, were rated lower in quality and produced more regret than did decisions that returned lesser amounts of profit but either did not miss or missed only slightly better alternatives. These effects were mediated by upward counterfactuals and moderated by participants’ orientation to the decision context. That decision evaluations were affected by the availability and magnitude of alternative outcomes rather than the positivity of (...) actual outcomes is counter to the outcome bias effect—a bias in which decisions are rated more positively when they led to more positive outcomes. Experiment 3 demonstrated that these effects represent a bias that occurs even when it is clear that the process by which decisions were made followed rational decision processes. This research suggests that when alter.. (shrink)

People judge that an individual who attempts to harm someone but fails should be blamed and punished more when they imagine how things could have turned out worse, compared to when they imagine how things could have turned out the same, or when they think only about what happened. This moral counterfactual amplification effect occurs when people believe the protagonist had no reason for the attempt to harm, and not when the protagonist had a reason, as Experiment 1 shows. It (...) occurs for intentional failed attempts to harm and also for accidental near-misses, as Experiment 2 shows, but not for failed attempts in which the harm occurs anyway by another cause, for both general judgments about the event and specific judgments about the individual's actions, as Experiments 3 and 4 show. The implications for understanding the role of counterfactual thoughts in moral judgement are discussed. (shrink)

In the hopes of finding supporting evidence for various accounts of actual causation, many philosophers have recently turned to psychological findings about the influence of norms on counterfactual cognition. Surprisingly little philosophical attention has been paid, however, to the question of why considerations of normality should be relevant to counterfactual cognition to begin with. In this paper, I follow two aims. First, against the methodology of two prominent psychological accounts, I argue for a functional approach to understanding the selectivity of (...) counterfactual cognition. Second, I take some steps towards a systematic analysis by providing a qualitative, decision‐theoretic account of one important function of counterfactual thinking, namely, inferring, in the face of undesirable outcomes, corrective policies that prevent the occurrence of similar outcomes in future circumstances. I make a case for employing this analysis by (a) showing its value for assessing the rationality of imagination‐driven counterfactual generation, (b) highlighting its use for making sense of practices in history and policy analysis where counterfactual selection plays a central role, and (c) demonstrating its diagnostic value for identifying areas where counterfactual generation may lead us into epistemic and ethical troubles. (shrink)

We examine two competing effects of beliefs on conditional inferences. The suppression effect occurs for conditionals, for example, “if she watered the plants they bloomed,” when beliefs about additional background conditions, for example, “if the sun shone they bloomed” decrease the frequency of inferences such as modus tollens (from “the plants did not bloom” to “therefore she did not water them”). In contrast, the counterfactual elevation effect occurs for counterfactual conditionals, for example, “if she had watered the plants they would (...) have bloomed,” when beliefs about the known or presupposed facts, “she did not water the plants and they did not bloom” increase the frequency of inferences such as modus tollens. We report six experiments that show that beliefs about additional conditions take precedence over beliefs about presupposed facts for counterfactuals. The modus tollens inference is suppressed for counterfactuals that contain additional conditions (Experiments 1a and 1b). The denial of the antecedent inference (from “she did not water the plants” to “therefore they did not bloom”) is suppressed for counterfactuals that contain alternatives (Experiments 2a and 2b). We report a new “switched‐suppression” effect for conditionals with negated components, for example, “if she had not watered the plants they would not have bloomed”: modus tollens is suppressed by alternatives and denial of the antecedent by additional conditions, rather than vice versa (Experiments 3a and 3b). We discuss the implications of the results for alternative theories of conditional reasoning. (shrink)

When people understand a counterfactual such as “if the flowers had been roses, the trees would have been orange trees,” they think about the conjecture, “there were roses and orange trees,” and they also think about its opposite, the presupposed facts. We test whether people think about the opposite by representing alternates, for example, “poppies and apple trees,” or whether models can contain symbols, for example, “no roses and no orange trees.” We report the discovery of an inference‐to‐alternates effect—a tendency (...) to make an affirmative inference that refers to an alternate even from a negative minor premise, for example, “there were no orange trees, therefore there were poppies.” Nine experiments show the inference‐to‐alternates effect occurs in a binary context, but not a multiple context, and for direct and indirect reference; it can be induced and reduced by prior experience with similar inferences, and it also occurs for indicative conditionals. The results have implications for theories of counterfactual conditionals, and of negation. (shrink)