Imaginative resistance refers to a phenomenon in which people resist engaging in particular prompted imaginative activities. Philosophers have primarily theorized about this phenomenon from the armchair. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of empirical methods for investigating imaginative resistance. We present two studies that help to establish the psychological reality of imaginative resistance, and to uncover one factor that is significant for explaining this phenomenon but low in psychological salience: genre. Furthermore, our studies have the methodological upshot of showing (...) how empirical tools can complement the predominant armchair approach to philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

It is standard practice in philosophical inquiry to test a general thesis (of the form 'F iff G' or 'F only if G') by attempting to construct a counterexample to it. If we can imagine or conceive of1an F that isn't a G, then we have evidence that there could be an F that isn't a G — and thus evidence against the thesis in question; if not, then the thesis is (at least temporarily) secure. Or so it is standardly (...) claimed.But there is increasing skepticism about how seriously to take what we can imagine or conceive as evidence for (or against) a priori philosophical theses, given the many historical examples of now-questionable theses that once seemed impossible to doubt — and also the recent experimental research .. (shrink)

The assumption that philosophers rely on intuitions to justify their philosophical positions has recently come under substantial criticism. In order to protect philosophy from experimental findings that suggest that intuitions are epistemically problematic, a number of metaphilosophers have argued that intuitions play no substantial epistemic role in philosophy. This paper focuses on attempts to deny intuitions’ epistemic role through exegetical analysis of original thought experiments. Using Deutsch’s particularly well-developed exegesis of Gettier’s 10 coin case as an exemplar of this method, (...) I examine the challenges the strategy faces. I argue that intuition denial fails to provide a satisfactory account of how verdicts of thought experiments are justified. Instead, it commits intuition deniers to the conclusion that the arguments of Gettier, Kripke, Thomson, and others are bad arguments. As a result, rather than defusing challenges to the case method raised by experimental philosophers, intuition denial ultimately leads to the same troubling conclusion – that philosophers hold their positions on bad grounds. (shrink)

Traditionally, theorists suggested that imaginative resistance is limited to morally repugnant claims. More recently, theorists have argued that the phenomenon of imaginative resistance is wider in scope, extending to descriptive claims. On both sides, though, theorists have focused on cases where imaginative resistance goes right, tracking something that is wrong with the story—that it is morally repugnant, or conceptually contradictory. I use a rarely cited discussion from Kant to argue that imaginative resistance can also occur when something goes wrong with (...) the reader—namely, when a reader imports their own biases into the story, and resists a descriptive claim as a result. In identifying this new class of claims that can meet imaginative resistance, Kant presses the question: when should we cultivate imaginative resistance and when should we fight it? (shrink)

According to what Hume termed an ‘establish’d maxim’, nothing absolutely impossible is imaginable. It has recently been claimed against this that given the ubiquity of stipulative imagination, where one imagines a proposition simply by adding it as a stipulation about the imagined situation, it seems that we can imagine any impossibility whatsoever, even plain contradictions: all we need to do is add them as stipulations. The aim of this article is both to defend Hume’s maxim against this objection and – (...) hopefully interestingly – to do so while granting the assumption that adding something as a stipulation is a valid way of imagining something. To this end, appeal is made to a particular development of a second Humeanism, according to which necessary truths are analytic in the sense that their truth follows from their meaning. Their analyticity, it is then argued, secures that they are true in all imagined situations. Therefore, even if it is right that a valid way of imagining something is to add it as a stipulation, attempting to stipulate that, say, some imaginary bachelor is also married is bound to fail: you can’t stipulate it to be the case because it really isn’t the case. (shrink)

The puzzle of imaginative desire arises from the difficulty of accounting for the surprising behaviour of desire in imaginative activities such as our engagement with fiction and our games of pretend. Several philosophers have recently attempted to solve this puzzle by introducing a class of novel mental states—what they call desire-like imaginings or i-desires. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the i-desire solution to the puzzle of imaginative desire. The introduction of i-desires is both ontologically profligate and (...) unnecessary, and, most importantly, fails to make sense of what we are doing in the imaginative contexts in question. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate how far we can use stories to learn about logic. How can we engage with fiction in order to come to find out what logical principles are actually valid? Is that possible at all? I claim that it is, and I propose two case studies to make the point.

In my “Creatures of Fiction, Objects of Myth” (2014), I present and defend an argument for thinking that mythical creationism—the view that mythical objects like phlogiston and Vulcan are abstract artifacts—is false. One intriguing sort of objection to my argument has been recently put forth by Zvolenszky (2016); she claims that a crucial premise is seen to be unjustified once one considers the phenomena of inadvertently created abstracta—specifically, inadvertently created fictional characters. I argue here that even if we admit inadvertently (...) created abstracta into our ontology, my argument survives. I ultimately defend a view on which fictional characters (if real) may be countenanced as created abstracta whether purposefully created or not, yet mythical objects are best taken to be discoverable, Platonic abstracta (if real). We can see that such a hybrid ontology is justified once we take proper note of the nature of the sorts of authorial activities involved in fictional storytelling and scientific hypothesizing. (shrink)

This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the con-text of a fiction: -/- (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl. -/- This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of (...) this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated ac-cording to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative properties, even in non-actual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our be-liefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional atti-tudes with us into the fiction. To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms, based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions. (shrink)

This paper defends a theory of fictional truth. According to this theory, there is a fact of the matter concerning the number of hairs on Sherlock Holmes' head, and likewise for any other meaningful question one could ask about what's true in a work of fiction. We argue that a theory of this form is needed to account for the patterns in our judgments about attitude reports that embed fictional claims. We contrast our view with one of the dominant approaches (...) to fictional truth, which originates with David Lewis. Along the way we explore the relationship between fiction, counterfactuals, and vagueness. (shrink)

Imagination seems to play an epistemic role in philosophical and scientific thought experiments, mindreading, and ordinary practical deliberations insofar as it generates new knowledge of contingent facts about the world. However, it also seems that imagination is limited to creative generation of ideas. Sometimes we imagine fanciful ideas that depart freely from reality. The conjunction of these claims is what I call the puzzle of knowledge through imagination. This chapter aims to resolve this puzzle. I argue that imagination has an (...) epistemic role to play, but it is limited to the context of discovery. Imagination generates ideas, but other cognitive capacities must be employed to evaluate these ideas in order for them to count as knowledge. Consideration of the Simulation Theory's so-called "threat of collapse” provides further evidence that imagination does not, on its own, yield new knowledge of contingent facts, and it suggests a way to supplement imagination in order to get such knowledge. (shrink)

To imagine is to form a mental representation that does not aim at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are. One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one’s own. Unlike perceiving and believing, imagining something does not require one to consider that something to be the case. Unlike desiring or anticipating, imagining something does not require one to wish or expect that something (...) to be the case. // -/- Imagination is involved in a wide variety of human activities, and has been explored from a wide range of philosophical perspectives. Philosophers of mind have examined imagination’s role in mindreading and in pretense. Philosophical aestheticians have examined imagination’s role in creating and in engaging with different types of artworks. Epistemologists have examined imagination’s role in theoretical thought experiments and in practical decision-making. Philosophers of language have examined imagination’s role in irony and metaphor. // -/- Because of the breadth of the topic, this entry focuses exclusively on contemporary discussions of imagination in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. (shrink)

A fictional text is commonly viewed as constituting an invitation to play a certain game of make-believe, with the individual sentences written by the author providing the propositions we are to imagine and/or accept as true within the fiction. However, we can’t always take the text at face value. What narratologists call ‘unreliable narrators’ may present a confused or misleading picture of the fictional world. Meanwhile there has been a debate in philosophy about so-called ‘imaginative resistance’ in which we are (...) inclined to resist imagining (or even accepting as true in the fiction) what’s explicitly stated in the text. But if we can’t take the text’s word for it, how do we determine what’s true in a fiction? We propose an account of fiction interpretation in a dynamic setting (a version of DRT with a mechanism for opening, updating, and closing temporary ‘workspaces’) and combine this framework with belief revision logic. With these tools in hand we turn to modelling imaginative resistance and unreliable narrators. (shrink)

This thesis develops methods for representing how the contents of theories of meaning become conceived by their users. These contents are treated as the range of systematically elicited conceptions afforded by a designated corpus of key texts. The approach being taken involves first detailing a formal scheme for the components of situations attributed to various entities. This scheme is then applied as a framing device to form a template which accounts for the shared structure between the mental spaces which embody (...) how people conceive different theories of meaning. For the purposes of this task, cognition is treated as embodied in the sense that both the form and content of personal conceptualisations are largely dependent on what both bodily and ecological factors afford. The purpose of this approach is to help understand how theories operate when viewed as worldly entities within a materialist framework. The significance of such understanding lies in enabling analyses and comparisons which account for the effects of material restrictions such as how a theory’s presentation must necessarily be selective and how human cognition operates on models set by precedent. The framework being provided here allows the conceptions each individual theory of meaning elicits to be reduced to formal, commensurate models which account for differences between typical influences on the conceptions characteristic of different demographics such as experts of related fields. Approaching theories of meaning from this angle also reveals new avenues of comparison concerning otherwise implicit details. One involves theory-internal conditions on the full material identity of meaning-instantiating entities. The other concerns the extent of the domains for aggregating applicable influences for which a theory accounts and the range of those it may accommodate. (shrink)

The buck-passing account of value involves a positive and a negative claim. The positive claim is that to be good is to have reasons for a pro-attitude. The negative claim is that goodness itself is not a reason for a pro-attitude. Unlike Scanlon, Parfit rejects the negative claim. He maintains that goodness is reason-providing, but that the reason provided is not an additional reason, additional, that is, to the reason provided by the good-making property. I consider various ways in which (...) this may be understood and reject all of them. So I conclude that buck-passers cannot reject the negative claim. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion has forcefully criticized both Donnellan's and Evans’ claims on the contingent a priori, and she has developed an “acquaintanceless” account of singular thoughts as an alternative view. Jeshion claims that one can fully grasp a singular thought expressed by a sentence including a proper name, even if its reference has been descriptively fixed and one’s access to the referent is “mediated” by that description. But she still wants to reject “semantic instrumentalism”, the view (...) that “there are no substantive conditions of any sort on having singular thought. We can freely generate singular thoughts at will by manipulating the apparatus of direct reference.” Her account of singular thoughts is a psychological one, rejecting any epistemic requirement. Having singular thoughts is for her a matter of deploying “mental files” or “dossiers” that play a significant role in the cognitive life of the individual. This paper elaborates on an alternative descriptivist-friendly view, which has important points of contact with Jeshion’s. It differs, particularly in that it is an epistemic view; it is only a broadly understood acquaintance view, as it will transpire, but this does not make it a mere terminological variation on Jeshion’s acquaintanceless one. To argue for it, the paper discusses some relevant aspects of the semantics of fictional discourse. (shrink)

In (1959), Carnap famously attacked Heidegger for having constructed an insane metaphysics based on a misconception of both the logical form and the semantics of ordinary language. In what follows, it will be argued that, once one appropriately (i.e., in a Russellian fashion) reads Heidegger’s famous sentence that should paradigmatically exemplify such a misconception, i.e., “the nothing nothings”, there is nothing either logically or semantically wrong with it. The real controversy as to how that sentence has to be evaluated—not as (...) to its meaning but as to its truth—lies at the metaphysico- ontological level. For in order for the sentence to be true one has to endorse an ontology of impossibilia and Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles. (shrink)

Among the tools the epistemologist brings to the table ought to be, I suggest, a firm understanding of the imagination--one that is informed by philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. In my dissertation, I highlight several ways in which such an understanding of the imagination can yield insight into traditional questions in epistemology. My dissertation falls into three parts. In Part I, I argue that dreaming should be understood in imaginative terms, and that this has important implications for questions (...) about dream skepticism. In Part II, I argue that an understanding of the imagination is important for understanding important parts of philosophical methodology--particularly those involving thought experiments. I mean in Part II to be vindicating a great deal of traditional methodology. In Part III, I explore what I take to be a number of deep connections between knowledge and counterfactuals. I defend a form of contextualism in each domain, and argue that inference among imaginings, with its important structural similarities to inference in belief, plays a central role in the epistemology of counterfactuals. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance (IR) is rejecting a claim that is true within a fictional world. Accounts that describe IR hold that readers exit a fiction at points of resistance. But if resistance entails exiting a fiction, then learning morality from fiction doesn’t occur. But moral learning from fiction does occur; some such cases are instances of accepting a norm one first denied. I amend current solutions to IR with poetic license. The more poetic license granted a work, the more flexible one (...) is regarding perceived falsehoods. Instead of exiting the fiction, one has the chance to stay engaged and possibly learn norms she previously denied. (shrink)