When we see an object, we also represent those parts of it that are not visible. The question is how we represent them: this is the problem of amodal perception. I will consider three possible accounts: (a) we see them, (b) we have non-perceptual beliefs about them and (c) we have immediate perceptual access to them, and point out that all of these views face both empirical and conceptual objections. I suggest and defend a fourth account, according to which we (...) represent the occluded parts of perceived objects by means of mental imagery. This conclusion could be thought of as a (weak) version of the Strawsonian dictum, according to which “imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself”. (shrink)

Look at a red apple. Now close your eyes and visualize this apple. Your perceptual state and your imagery of the apple are very similar in some respects. They are also different in some respects. The aim of this paper is to address three questions about the relation between perception and imagination: -/- (a) How similar are perception and imagination and what explains this similarity? (b) How different are perception and imagination and what explains this difference? (c) How do perception (...) and imagination interact? (shrink)

Abstract: This entry elucidates causal and constitutive roles that various forms of imagining play in human action. Imagination influences more kinds of action than just pretend play. I distinguish different senses of the terms “imagining” and “imagination”: imagistic imagining, propositional imagining, and constructive imagining. Each variety of imagining makes its own characteristic contributions to action. Imagistic imagining can structure bodily movement. Propositional imagining interacts with desires to motivate pretend play and mimetic expressive action. And constructive imagination generates representations of possibilities (...) and actions on the basis of which we choose what to do. [Version archived here is a penultimate draft.]. (shrink)

This is a penultimate draft of a paper that will appear in Handbook of Imagination, Amy Kind (ed.). Routledge Press. Please cite only the final printed version.

The psychological mechanism of decision-making has traditionally been modeled with the help of belief-desire psychology: the agent has some desires (or other pro-attitudes) and some background beliefs and deciding between two possible actions is a matter of comparing the probability of the satisfaction of these desires given the background beliefs in the case of the performance of each action. There is a wealth of recent empirical findings about how we actually make decisions that seems to be in conflict with this (...) picture. My aim is to outline an alternative model that is consistent with these empirical findings. This alternative model emphasizes the role imagination plays in our decisions: when we decide between two possible actions, we imagine ourselves in the situation that we imagine to be the outcome of these two actions and then compare these two imaginings. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the nature of confabulatory explanations of action guided by implicit bias. I claim that such explanations can have significant epistemic benefits in spite of their obvious epistemic costs, and that such benefits are not otherwise obtainable by the subject at the time at which the explanation is offered. I start by outlining the kinds of cases I have in mind, before characterising the phenomenon of confabulation by focusing on a few common features. Then I introduce (...) the notion of epistemic innocence to capture the epistemic status of those cognitions which have both obvious epistemic faults and some significant epistemic benefit. A cognition is epistemically innocent if it delivers some epistemic benefit to the subject which would not be attainable otherwise because alternative (less epistemically faulty) cognitions that could deliver the same benefit are unavailable to the subject at that time. I ask whether confabulatory explanations of actions guided by implicit bias have epistemic benefits and whether there are genuine alternatives to forming a confabulatory explanation in the circumstances in which subjects confabulate. On the basis of my analysis of confabulatory explanations of actions guided by implicit bias, I argue that such explanations have the potential for epistemic innocence. I conclude that epistemic evaluation of confabulatory explanations of action guided by implicit bias ought to tell a richer story, one which takes into account the context in which the explanation occurs. (shrink)

What are hallucinations? A common view in the philosophical literature is that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of perceptual experience. I argue instead that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of sensory imagination. As well as providing a good account of many actual cases of hallucination, the view that hallucination is a kind of imagination represents a promising account of hallucination from the perspective of a disjunctivist theory of perception like naïve realism. This is because it provides a way of giving a positive (...) characterisation of hallucination—rather than characterising hallucinations in negative, relational, terms as mental events that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences. (shrink)

Implicit attitudes are mental states that appear sometimes to cause agents to act in ways that conflict with their considered beliefs. Implicit attitudes are usually held to be mere associations between representations. Recently, however, some philosophers have suggested that they are, or are very like, ordinary beliefs: they are apt to feature in properly inferential processing. This claim is important, in part because there is good reason to think that the vocabulary in which we make moral assessments of ourselves and (...) of others is keyed to folk psychological concepts, like ‘belief’, and not to concepts that feature only in scientific psychology: if implicit attitudes are beliefs there is a prima facie case for thinking that they can serve as the basis for particular kinds of moral assessment. In this paper I argue that while implicit attitudes have propositional structure, their sensitivity and responsiveness to other mental representations is too patchy and fragmented for them to properly be considered beliefs. Instead, they are a sui generis kind of mental state, a state I dub patchy endorsements. (shrink)

In this Part II, I investigate different approaches to the question of what makes imagining different from belief. I find that the sentiment-based approach of David Hume falls short, as does the teleological approach, once advocated by David Velleman. I then consider whether the inferential properties of beliefs and imaginings may differ. Beliefs, I claim, exhibit an anti-symmetric inferential governance over imaginings: they are the background that makes inference from one imagining to the other possible; the reverse is not true, (...) and this allows us to distinguish the two attitudes. I then go on to consider the action theory of imagining and the role that imaginings play in generating emotion. (shrink)

Jennifer Church presents a new account of perception, which shows how imagining alternative perspectives and possibilities plays a key role in creating and validating experiences of self-evident objectivity. She explores the nature of moral perception and aesthetic perception, and argues that perception can be both literal and substantive.

We explore the possibility of characterizing belief wholly in terms of its first-order functional role, its input (evidence) and output (further beliefs and actions), by addressing some common challenges to the view. One challenge concerns the fact that not all belief is evidence-sensitive. In response to this, normativists and teleo-functionalists have concluded that something over and above functional role is needed, a norm or a telos. We argue that both allow for implausibly much divergence between belief and evidence. Others have (...) suggested that belief should be saved as the evidence-sensitive attitude, by making it share its motivational role with an unrecognized state: alief. We argue that the appeal to alief faces a dilemma: Either explanation of intentional action by means of alief is a species of intentional explanation, in which case it becomes hard to distinguish alief from (irrational) belief, or alief is sufficiently different from belief, but then neither the explanation nor the explanandum (action) are recognizably intentional any longer. We conclude that the most promising way forward is an account of belief that makes use of the full functional role of belief, including its role in theoretical reasoning. (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)

Inquiry, Volume 57, Issue 1, Page 55-96, February 2014.

Much of Tamar Gendler’s dense and engaging book argues for the emotional, cognitive and motivational power of imagination, which is presented as a central feature of human mental architecture. But in the final chapters Gendler argues that some of us have over-exploited this resource, too easily assuming that, if belief cannot explain a class of human behaviours, imagination will do the job. She gives a number of examples of problematic behaviours (‘Gendler cases’, as we shall say), which in her view (...) can be explained only by appeal to a previously unrecognized mental state: alief, different from belief and from imagination, and from any other mental kinds we are familiar with. We argue that it’s a mistake to explain Gendler cases in terms of a single mental state of the kind alief is supposed to be; we should appeal instead to a variety of representational states, including familiar ones such as belief, desire, imagination and perception. While a few of these cases do plausibly require us to acknowledge representations at levels other than the personal one, none require us to acknowledge the existence of aliefs, at least as those states are officially characterized by Gendler. We then turn to one of Gendler’s more general arguments for the new category of alief: the argument from hyperopacity. We reject that argument. But all this is not simply die-hard conservativism: we conclude by elaborating the idea (somewhat in the spirit of Gendler’s proposal) that various representational states not acknowledged by folk-psychology have a role to play in explaining behaviour, emotion and cognition. (shrink)

This essay attempts to clarify the nature and structure of aliefs. First I distinguish between a robust notion of aliefs and a deflated one. A robust notion of aliefs would introduce aliefs into our psychological ontology as a hitherto undiscovered kind, whereas a deflated notion of aliefs would identify aliefs as a set of pre-existing psychological states. I then propose the following dilemma: one the one hand, if aliefs have propositional content, then it is unclear exactly how aliefs differ from (...) psychological states we already countenance, in which case there is no robust notion of aliefs; on the other, if aliefs just contain associative content, then they cannot do the explanatory work set out for them, in which case there is no reason to posit aliefs at all. Thus, it appears that we have little reason to posit the novel category of robust aliefs. (shrink)

Some philosophers (including Urmson, Humberstone, Shah, and Velleman) hold that believing that p distinctively involves applying a norm according to which the truth of p is a criterion for the success or correctness of the attitude. On this view, imagining and assuming differ from believing in that no such norm is applied. I argue against this view with counterexamples showing that applying the norm of truth is neither necessary nor sufficient for distinguishing believing from imagining and assuming. Then I argue (...) that the different functional properties of these mental states are enough to distinguish them, and that norm-application doesn't help us draw the functional distinctions. (shrink)

A popular view has it that the mental representations underlying human pretense are not beliefs, but are “belief-like” in important ways. This view typically posits a distinctive cognitive attitude (a “DCA”) called “imagination” that is taken toward the propositions entertained during pretense, along with correspondingly distinct elements of cognitive architecture. This paper argues that the characteristics of pretense motivating such views of imagination can be explained without positing a DCA, or other cognitive architectural features beyond those regulating normal belief and (...) desire. On the present “Single Attitude” account of imagination, propositional imagining just is a form of believing. The Single Attitude account is also distinguished from “metarepresentational” accounts of pretense, which hold that both pretending and recognizing pretense in others require one to have concepts of mental states. It is argued, to the contrary, that pretending and recognizing pretense require neither a DCA nor possession of mental state concepts. (shrink)

Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and theories in different domains of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology and the social sciences.

Imaginative representations are crucial to the generation of action--both pretense and plain action. But well-known theories of imagination on offer in the literature [1] fail to describe how perceptually-formatted imaginings (mental images) and motor imaginings function in the generation of action and [2] fail to recognize the important fact that spatially rich imagining can be integrated into one's perceptual manifold. In this paper, I present a theory of imagining that shows how spatially rich imagining functions in the generation of action. (...) I also describe the imaginative structures behind two under-explored forms of action: semi-pretense and pretense layering. In addition, I suggest that my theory of imagining meshes better than the competitors with current work in cognitive and affective neuroscience. (shrink)

This paper claims that the standard characterization of the motivational role of belief should be supplemented. Beliefs do not only, jointly with desires, cause and rationalize actions that will satisfy the desires, if the beliefs are true; beliefs are also the practical ground of other cognitive attitudes, like imagining, which means beliefs determine whether and when one acts with those other attitudes as the cognitive inputs into choices and practical reasoning. In addition to arguing for this thesis, I take issue (...) with Velleman's argument that belief and imagining cannot be distinguished on the basis of motivational role. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the phenomenology of mental agency by addressing the question of the ontological category of the conscious mental acts an agent is aware of when engaged in such directed mental activities as conscious calculation and deliberation. An argument is offered for the claim that the mental acts in question must involve phenomenally conscious mental events that have temporal extension. The problem the chapter goes on to address is how to reconcile this line of thought with Geach's arguments (...) for the claim that mental acts like judging lack temporal extension. (shrink)

You’re imagining, in the course of a different game of make-believe, that you’re a bank robber. You don’t believe that you’re a bank robber. You are moved to point your finger, gun-wise, at the person pretending to be the bank teller and say, “Stick ‘em up! This is a robbery!”.

Chris Frith has argued that a loss of the sense of agency is central to schizophrenia. This suggests a connection between hallucinations and delusions on the one hand, and the misidentification of the subject’s imaginings as perceptions and beliefs on the other. In particular, understanding the mechanisms that underlie imagination may help us to explain the puzzling phenomena of thought insertion and withdrawal. Frith sometimes states his argument in terms of a loss of metarepresentational capacity in schizophrenia. I argue that (...) this formulation is unhelpful. (shrink)

Despite their intuitive appeal and a long philosophical history, imagery-based accounts of the imagination have fallen into disfavor in contemporary discussions. The philosophical pressure to reject such accounts seems to derive from two distinct sources. First, the fact that mental images have proved difficult to accommodate within a scientific conception of mind has led to numerous attempts to explain away their existence, and this in turn has led to attempts to explain the phenomenon of imagining without reference to such ontologically (...) dubious entities as mental images. Second, even those philosophers who accept mental images in their ontology have worried about what seem to be fairly obvious examples of imaginings that occur without imagery. In this paper, I aim to relieve both these points of philosophical pressure and, in the process, develop a new imagery-based account of the imagination: the imagery model. (shrink)

What is it like to dream? On an orthodox view, dreams involve misleading sensations and false beliefs. I argue, on philosophical, psychological, and neurophysiological grounds, that orthodoxy about dreaming should be rejected in favor of an imagination model of dreaming. I am thus in partial agreement with Colin McGinn, who has argued that we do not have misleading sensory experiences while dreaming, and partially in agreement with Ernest Sosa, who has argued that we do not form false beliefs while dreaming. (...) Rather, on my view, dreams involve mental imagery and propositional imagination. I defend the imagination model of dreaming from objections. (shrink)

This paper explores the sense in which belief "aims at the truth". In this course of this exploration, it discusses the difference between belief and make-believe, the nature of psychoanalytic explanation, the supposed "normativity of meaning", and related topics.

The paper examines the relationships between the contents of imaginative episodes and the mental images that often play a central role within them. It considers, for example, whether the presence of mental imagery is required for a mental episode to count as an imagining.

How are biases encoded in our representations of social categories? Philosophical and empirical discussions of implicit bias overwhelmingly focus on salient or statistical associations between target features and representations of social categories. These are the sorts of associations probed by the Implicit Association Test and various priming tasks. In this paper, we argue that these discussions systematically overlook an alternative way in which biases are encoded, that is, in the dependency networks that are part of our representations of social categories. (...) Dependency networks encode information about how features in a conceptual representation depend on each other. This information determines the degree of centrality of a feature for a conceptual representation. Importantly, centrally encoded biases systematically disassociate from those encoded in salient-statistical associations. Furthermore, the degree of centrality of a feature determines its cross-contextual stability: in general, the more central a feature is for a concept, the more likely it is to survive into a wide array of cognitive tasks involving that concept. Accordingly, implicit biases that are encoded in the central features of concepts are predicted to be more resilient across different tasks and contexts. As a result, the distinction between centrally encoded and salient-statistical biases has important theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

What is the status of research on implicit bias? In light of meta‐analyses revealing ostensibly low average correlations between implicit measures and behavior, as well as various other psychometric concerns, criticism has become ubiquitous. We argue that while there are significant challenges and ample room for improvement, research on the causes, psychological properties, and behavioral effects of implicit bias continues to deserve a role in the sciences of the mind as well as in efforts to understand, and ultimately combat, discrimination (...) and inequality. (shrink)

Superstition and confabulation are extremely pervasive in our cognitive lives. Whilst both these phenomena are widely discussed in the recent psychological literature, however, the relationship between them has not been the object of much explicit attention. In this paper, I argue that this relationship is actually very close, and deserves indepth consideration. I argue that superstitious and confabulatory attitudes share several key features and are rooted in the same psychological mechanisms. Moreover, some of the key features that superstitious and confabulatory (...) attitudes share reveal such attitudes to be non-doxastic in nature, with important implications for our assessment of their epistemic rationality. Many instances of what we call superstitious and confabulatory ‘beliefs’ are not, in fact, beliefs; hence, entertaining them may be less irrational than it prima facie seems to be. (shrink)

The term 'implicit bias' has very swiftly been incorporated into philosophical discourse. Our aim in this paper is to scrutinise the phenomena that fall under the rubric of implicit bias. The term is often used in a rather broad sense, to capture a range of implicit social cognitions, and this is useful for some purposes. However, we here articulate some of the important differences between phenomena identified as instances of implicit bias. We caution against ignoring these differences: it is likely (...) they have considerable significance, not least for the sorts of normative recommendations being made concerning how to mitigate the bad effects of implicit bias. (shrink)

I argue that explanations of doxastic transparency which go via an appeal to an aim or norm of belief are problematic. I offer a new explanation which appeals to a biological function of our mechanisms for belief production. I begin by characterizing the phenomenon, and then move to the teleological and normative accounts of belief, advertised by their proponents as able to give an explanation of it. I argue that, at the very least, both accounts face serious difficulties in this (...) endeavour. These difficulties are a function of seeking an explanation of transparency at the agential level, either with the subject aiming at truth, or being guided by a norm of truth. I adopt a motivational account of belief, one which severs the connection between belief and truth, and supplement this with an account of actual world beliefs. My alternative explanation is found at the sub-intentional, non-agential level, secured by biology. This explanation casts transparency not as related to the nature of deliberation over what to believe, but rather as contingently characterizing the beliefs of some believers, namely those with a particular biological history. My explanation thus parts company with what has come before along two dimensions: it moves away from transparency being something related to the agent’s aims or commitments, and it understands it as a contingent phenomenon. I close by considering an objection to my view—that transparency must not be understood as a contingent phenomenon—and a nearby alternative position which avoids this consequence. I respond to this objection and give reasons not to endorse the nearby alternative. I conclude that my explanation does not face the difficulties of those offered by teleologists and normativists, and, that by moving away from agential explanations, and casting transparency as contingent, we can provide a successful explanation of it. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against the view that the representational structure of the implicit attitudes responsible for implicitly biased behaviour is propositional—as opposed to associationist. The proposal under criticism moves from the claim that implicit biased behaviour can occasionally be modulated by logical and evidential considerations to the view that the structure of the implicit attitudes responsible for such biased behaviour is propositional. I argue, in particular, against the truth of this conditional. Sensitivity to logical and evidential considerations, I (...) contend, proves to be an inadequate criterion for establishing the true representational structure of implicit attitudes. Considerations of a different kind, which emphasize the challenges posed by the structural social injustice that implicit attitudes reflect, offer, I conclude, better support for deciding this issue in favour of an associationist view. (shrink)

People cannot contemplate a proposition without believing that proposition. A model of belief fixation is sketched and used to explain hitherto disparate, recalcitrant, and somewhat mysterious psychological phenomena and philosophical paradoxes. Toward this end I also contend that our intuitive understanding of the workings of introspection is mistaken. In particular, I argue that propositional attitudes are beyond the grasp of our introspective capacities. We learn about our beliefs from observing our behavior, not from introspecting our stock beliefs. -/- The model (...) of belief fixation offered in the dissertation poses a novel dilemma for theories of rationality. One might have thought that the ability to contemplate ideas while withholding assent is a necessary condition on rationality. In short, it seems that rational creatures shouldn‘t just form their beliefs based on whatever they happen to think. However, it seems that we are creatures that automatically and reflexively form our beliefs based on whatever propositions we happen to consider. Thus, either the rational requirement that states that we must have evidence for our beliefs must be jettisoned or we must accept the conclusion that we are necessarily irrational. (shrink)

I offer here a new hypothesis about the nature of implicit attitudes. Psy- chologists and philosophers alike often distinguish implicit from explicit attitudes by maintaining that we are aware of the latter, but not aware of the former. Recent experimental evidence, however, seems to challenge this account. It would seem, for example, that participants are frequently quite adept at predicting their own perfor- mances on measures of implicit attitudes. I propose here that most theorists in this area have nonetheless overlooked (...) a commonsense distinction regarding how we can be aware of attitudes, a difference that fundamentally distinguishes implicit and explicit attitudes. Along the way, I discuss the implications that this distinction may hold for future debates about and experimental investigations into the nature of implicit attitudes. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out some desiderata for a model of implicit cognition. I present test cases and suggest that, when considered in light of them, some recent models of implicit cognition fail to satisfy these desiderata. The test cases also bring to light an important class of cases that have been almost completely ignored in philosophical discussions of implicit cognition and implicit bias. These cases have important work to do in helping us understand both the role of implicit (...) cognition in action and our attempts to combat implicit biases. (shrink)

Chris Frith has argued that a loss of the sense of agency is central to schizophrenia. This suggests a connection between hallucinations and delusions on the one hand, and the misidentification of the subject’s imaginings as perceptions and beliefs on the other. In particular, understanding the mechanisms that underlie imagination may help us to explain the puzzling phenomena of thought insertion and withdrawal. Frith sometimes states his argument in terms of a loss of metarepresentational capacity in schizophrenia. I argue that (...) this formulation is unhelpful. (shrink)