Results for ' imagination'

956 found
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  1. Explaining Imagination.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2020 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis (...)
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  2. The Imagination Box.Shen-yi Liao & Tyler Doggett - 2014 - Journal of Philosophy 111 (5):259-275.
    Imaginative immersion refers to a phenomenon in which one loses oneself in make-believe. Susanna Schellenberg says that the best explanation of imaginative immersion involves a radical revision to cognitive architecture. Instead of there being an attitude of belief and a distinct attitude of imagination, there should only be one attitude that represents a continuum between belief and imagination. -/- We argue otherwise. Although imaginative immersion is a crucial data point for theorizing about the imagination, positing a continuum (...)
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  3. Voluntary Imagination: A Fine-Grained Analysis.Ilaria Canavotto, Francesco Berto & Alessandro Giordani - 2020 - Review of Symbolic Logic (2):362-387.
    We study imagination as reality-oriented mental simulation (ROMS): the activity of simulating nonactual scenarios in one’s mind, to investigate what would happen if they were realized. Three connected questions concerning ROMS are: What is the logic, if there is one, of such an activity? How can we gain new knowledge via it? What is voluntary in it and what is not? We address them by building a list of core features of imagination as ROMS, drawing on research in (...)
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  4. Imaginative Resistance, Narrative Engagement, Genre.Shen-yi Liao - 2016 - Res Philosophica 93 (2):461-482.
    Imaginative resistance refers to a phenomenon in which people resist engaging in particular prompted imaginative activities. On one influential diagnosis of imaginative resistance, the systematic difficulties are due to these particular propositions’ discordance with real-world norms. This essay argues that this influential diagnosis is too simple. While imagination is indeed by default constrained by real-world norms during narrative engagement, it can be freed with the power of genre conventions and expectations.
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  5. Imaginative Attitudes.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2015 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (3):664-686.
    The point of this paper is to reveal a dogma in the ordinary conception of sensory imagination, and to suggest another way forward. The dogma springs from two main sources: a too close comparison of mental imagery to perceptual experience, and a too strong division between mental imagery and the traditional propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire). The result is an unworkable conception of the correctness conditions of sensory imaginings—one lacking any link between the conditions under which an (...)
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  6. Imagination, Fiction, and Perspectival Displacement.Justin D'Ambrosio & Daniel Stoljar - 2023 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind 3.
    The verb 'imagine' admits of perspectival modification: we can imagine things from above, from a distant point of view, or from the point of view of a Russian. But in such cases, there need be no person, either real or imagined, who is above or distant from what is imagined, or who has the point of view of a Russian. We call this the puzzle of perspectival displacement. This paper sets out the puzzle, shows how it does not just concern (...)
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  7. Imagination Through Knowledge.Shannon Spaulding - 2016 - In Amy Kind & Peter Kung (eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 207-226.
    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 (...)
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  8. Imagination is where the Action is.Neil Van Leeuwen - 2011 - Journal of Philosophy 108 (2):55-77.
    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 (...)
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  9. The Imaginative Agent.Neil Van Leeuwen - 2016 - In Amy Kind & Peter Kung (eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 85-109.
    Imagination contributes to human agency in ways that haven't been well understood. I argue here that pathways from imagistic imagining to emotional engagement support three important agential capacities: 1. bodily preparedness for potential events in one's nearby environment; 2. evaluation of potential future action; and 3. empathy-based moral appraisal. Importantly, however, the kind of pathway in question (I-C-E-C: imagining-categorization-emotion-conceptualization) also enables engagement with fiction. So human enchantment with fiction is a consequence of imaginative pathways that make us the kind (...)
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  10. What Imagination Teaches.Amy Kind - 2020 - In John Schwenkler & Enoch Lambert (eds.), Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change. Oxford University Press.
    David Lewis has argued that “having an experience is the best way or perhaps the only way, of coming to know what that experience is like”; when an experience is of a sufficiently new sort, mere science lessons are not enough. Developing this Lewisian line, L.A. Paul has suggested that some experiences are epistemically transformative. Until an individual has such an experience it remains epistemically inaccessible to her. No amount of stories and theories and testimony from others can teach her (...)
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  11. Imagining the Past: on the nature of episodic memory.Robert Hopkins - 2018 - In Fiona MacPherson Fabian Dorsch (ed.), Memory and Imagination. Oxford University Press.
    What kind of mental state is episodic memory? I defend the claim that it is, in key part, imagining the past, where the imagining in question is experiential imagining. To remember a past episode is to experientially imagine how things were, in a way controlled by one’s past experience of that episode. Call this the Inclusion View. I motive this view by appeal both to patterns of compatibilities and incompatibilities between various states, and to phenomenology. The bulk of the paper (...)
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  12. Imagination: A Sine Qua Non of Science.Michael T. Stuart - 2017 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy (49):9-32.
    What role does the imagination play in scientific progress? After examining several studies in cognitive science, I argue that one thing the imagination does is help to increase scientific understanding, which is itself indispensable for scientific progress. Then, I sketch a transcendental justification of the role of imagination in this process.
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  13. Moral imagination: implications of cognitive science for ethics.Mark Johnson - 1993 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors We (...)
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  14. Imagination and the Permissive View of Fictional Truth.Hannah H. Kim - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Imagination comes with varying degrees of sensory accompaniment. Sometimes imagining is phenomenologically lean (cognitive imagining); at other times, imagining involves or requires sensory presentation such as mental imagery (sensory imagining). Philosophers debate whether contradictions can obtain in fiction and whether cognitive imagining is robust enough to explain our engagement with fiction. In this paper, I defend the Principle of Poetic License by arguing for the Permissive View of fictional truth: we can have fictions in which a contradiction is true, (...)
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  15. Imaginative Vividness.Kind Amy - 2017 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3 (1):32-50.
    How are we to understand the phenomenology of imagining? Attempts to answer this question often invoke descriptors concerning the “vivacity” or “vividness” of our imaginative states. Not only are particular imaginings often phenomenologically compared and contrasted with other imaginings on grounds of how vivid they are, but such imaginings are also often compared and contrasted with perceptions and memories on similar grounds. Yet however natural it may be to use “vividness” and cognate terms in discussions of imagination, it does (...)
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  16. Imaginative Transportation.Samuel Kampa - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (4):683-696.
    Actors, undercover investigators, and readers of fiction sometimes report “losing themselves” in the characters they imitate or read about. They speak of “taking on” or “assuming” the beliefs, thoughts, and feelings of someone else. I offer an account of this strange but familiar phenomenon—what I call imaginative transportation.
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  17. Remembering, Imagining, and Memory Traces: Toward a Continuist Causal Theory.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2022 - In Andre Sant'Anna, Christopher McCarroll & Kourken Michaelian (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Memory. Current Controversies in Philosophy.
    The (dis)continuism debate in the philosophy and cognitive science of memory concerns whether remembering is continuous with episodic future thought and episodic counterfactual thought in being a form of constructive imagining. I argue that settling that dispute will hinge on whether the memory traces (or “engrams”) that support remembering impose arational, perception-like constraints that are too strong for remembering to constitute a kind of constructive imagining. In exploring that question, I articulate two conceptions of memory traces—the replay theory and the (...)
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  18. Imaginative immersion, regulation, and doxastic mediation.Alon Chasid - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4): 1-43.
    This paper puts forward an account of imaginative immersion. Elaborating on Kendall Walton’s thesis that imagining aims at the fictional truth, it first argues that imaginings are inherently rule- or norm-governed: they are ‘regulated’ by that which is presented as fictionally true. It then shows that an imaginer can follow the rule or norm mandating her to imagine the propositions presented as fictional truths either by acquiring explicit beliefs about how the rule (norm) is to be followed, or directly, without (...)
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  19. Imagination, Inference, and Apriority.Antonella Mallozzi - 2021 - In Amy Kind & Christopher Badura (eds.), Epistemic Uses of Imagination. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Is imagination a source of knowledge? Timothy Williamson has recently argued that our imaginative capacities can yield knowledge of a variety of matters, spanning from everyday practical matters to logic and set theory. Furthermore, imagination for Williamson plays a similar epistemic role in cognitive processes that we would traditionally classify as either a priori or a posteriori, which he takes to indicate that the distinction itself is shallow and epistemologically fruitless. In this chapter, I aim to defend the (...)
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  20. 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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  21. Imagination Cannot Justify Empirical Belief.Jonathan Egeland - 2021 - Episteme (4):1-7.
    A standard view in the epistemology of imagination is that imaginings can either provide justification for modal beliefs about what is possible (and perhaps counterfactual conditionals too), or no justification at all. However, in a couple of recent articles, Kind (2016; Forthcoming) argues that imaginings can justify empirical belief about what the world actually is like. In this article, I respond to her argument, showing that imagination doesn't provide the right sort of information to justify empirical belief. Nevertheless, (...)
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  22. 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 (...)
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  23. Imagining the Actual.Daniel Munro - 2021 - Philosophers' Imprint 21 (17).
    This paper investigates a capacity I call actuality-oriented imagining, by which we use sensory imagination in a way that's directed at representing the actual world. I argue that this kind of imagining is distinct from other, similar mental states in virtue of its distinctive content determination and success conditions. Actuality-oriented imagining is thus a distinctive cognitive capacity in its own right. Thinking about this capacity reveals that we should resist an intuitive tendency to think of the imagination’s primary (...)
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  24. 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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  25. Imaginative resistance and conversational implicature.Bence Nanay - 2010 - Philosophical Quarterly 60 (240):586-600.
    We experience resistance when we are engaging with fictional works which present certain (for example, morally objectionable) claims. But in virtue of what properties do sentences trigger this ‘imaginative resistance’? I argue that while most accounts of imaginative resistance have looked for semantic properties in virtue of which sentences trigger it, this is unlikely to give us a coherent account, because imaginative resistance is a pragmatic phenomenon. It works in a way very similar to Paul Grice's widely analysed ‘conversational implicature’.
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  26. Imagination extended and embedded: artifactual versus fictional accounts of models.Tarja Knuuttila - 2017 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 21):5077-5097.
    This paper presents an artifactual approach to models that also addresses their fictional features. It discusses first the imaginary accounts of models and fiction that set model descriptions apart from imagined-objects, concentrating on the latter :251–268, 2010; Frigg and Nguyen in The Monist 99:225–242, 2016; Godfrey-Smith in Biol Philos 21:725–740, 2006; Philos Stud 143:101–116, 2009). While the imaginary approaches accommodate surrogative reasoning as an important characteristic of scientific modeling, they simultaneously raise difficult questions concerning how the imagined entities are related (...)
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  27. 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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  28. Can imagination be unconscious?Amy Kind - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):13121-13141.
    Our ordinary conception of imagination takes it to be essentially a conscious phenomenon, and traditionally that’s how it had been treated in the philosophical literature. In fact, this claim had often been taken to be so obvious as not to need any argumentative support. But lately in the philosophical literature on imagination we see increasing support for the view that imagining need not occur consciously. In this paper, I examine the case for unconscious imagination. I’ll consider four (...)
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  29. Imagining stories: attitudes and operators.Neil Van Leeuwen - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (2):639-664.
    This essay argues that there are theoretical benefits to keeping distinct—more pervasively than the literature has done so far—the psychological states of imagining that p versus believing that in-the-story p, when it comes to cognition of fiction and other forms of narrative. Positing both in the minds of a story’s audience helps explain the full range of reactions characteristic of story consumption. This distinction also has interesting conceptual and explanatory dimensions that haven’t been carefully observed, and the two mental state (...)
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  30. Pretense, imagination, and belief: the Single Attitude theory.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 159 (2):155-179.
    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 (...)
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  31. Imagination in mathematics.Andrew Arana - 2016 - In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination. New York: Routledge. pp. 463-477.
    This article will consider imagination in mathematics from a historical point of view, noting the key moments in its conception during the ancient, modern and contemporary eras.
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  32. Imagining Experiences.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2016 - Noûs:561-586.
    It is often held that in imagining experiences we exploit a special imagistic way of representing mentality—one that enables us to think about mental states in terms of what it is like to have them. According to some, when this way of thinking about the mind is paired with more objective means, an explanatory gap between the phenomenal and physical features of mental states arises. This paper advances a view along those lines, but with a twist. What many take for (...)
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  33. Imagining in response to fiction: unpacking the infrastructure.Alon Chasid - 2019 - Philosophical Explorations 23 (1):31-48.
    Works of fiction are alleged to differ from works of nonfiction in instructing their audience to imagine their content. Indeed, works of fiction have been defined in terms of this feature: they are works that mandate us to imagine their content. This paper examines this definition of works of fiction, focusing on the nature of the activity that ensues in response to reading or watching fiction. Investigating how imaginings function in other contexts, I show, first, that they presuppose a cognitive (...)
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  34. Imagination and affective response.Robert Hopkins - 2010 - In Jonathan Webber (ed.), Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism. New York: Routledge. pp. 100-117.
    What is the relation between affective states, such as emotions and pleasure, and imagining? Do the latter cause the former, just as perceptual states do? Or are the former merely imagined, along with suitable objects? I consider this issue against the backdrop of Sartre’s theory of imagination, and drawing on his highly illuminating discussion of it. I suggest that, while it is commonly assumed that imaginative states cause affective responses much as do perceptions, the alternatives merit more careful consideration (...)
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  35. On Choosing What to Imagine.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2016 - In Amy Kind & Peter Kung (eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 61-84.
    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 (...)
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  36. Imagining the Past of the Present.Mark Windsor - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Some objects we value because they afford a felt connection with people, events, or places connected with their past. Visiting Canterbury cathedral, you encounter the place where, in 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered by four knights of Henry II. Knowing that you are standing in the very place where Becket’s blood was spilled gives the past event a sense of tangible reality. One feels ‘in touch with’ the past; history seems to ‘come alive’. In this paper, I propose an (...)
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  37. Imagination and Creativity.Dustin Stokes - 2016 - In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination. New York: Routledge.
    This paper surveys historical and recent philosophical discussions of the relations between imagination and creativity. In the first two sections, it covers two insufficiently studied analyses of the creative imagination, that of Kant and Sartre, respectively. The next section discusses imagination and its role in scientific discovery, with particular emphasis on the writings of Michael Polanyi, and on thought experiments and experimental design. The final section offers a brief discussion of some very recent work done on conceptual (...)
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  38. Imaginative Value Sensitive Design: Using Moral Imagination Theory to Inform Responsible Technology Design.Steven Umbrello - 2020 - Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (2):575-595.
    Safe-by-Design (SBD) frameworks for the development of emerging technologies have become an ever more popular means by which scholars argue that transformative emerging technologies can safely incorporate human values. One such popular SBD methodology is called Value Sensitive Design (VSD). A central tenet of this design methodology is to investigate stakeholder values and design those values into technologies during early stage research and development (R&D). To accomplish this, the VSD framework mandates that designers consult the philosophical and ethical literature to (...)
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  39. Imagination, Desire, and Rationality.Shannon Spaulding - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy 112 (9):457-476.
    We often have affective responses to fictional events. We feel afraid for Desdemona when Othello approaches her in a murderous rage. We feel disgust toward Iago for orchestrating this tragic event. What mental architecture could explain these affective responses? In this paper I consider the claim that the best explanation of our affective responses to fiction involves imaginative desires. Some theorists argue that accounts that do not invoke imaginative desires imply that consumers of fiction have irrational desires. I argue that (...)
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  40. Imagination, Modal Knowledge, and Modal Understanding.Uriah Kriegel - 2024 - In Íngrid Vendrell-Ferran & Christiana Werner (eds.), Imagination and Experience: Philosophical Explorations. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Recent work on the imagination has stressed the epistemic significance of imaginative experiences, notably in justifying modal beliefs. An immediate problem with this is that modal beliefs appear to admit of justification through the mere exercise of rational capacities. For instance, mastery of the concepts of square, circle, and possibility should suffice to form the justified belief that a square circle is not possible, and mastery of the concepts of pig, flying, and possibility should suffice to form a justified (...)
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  41. Empirically Investigating Imaginative Resistance.Shen-yi Liao, Nina Strohminger & Chandra Sekhar Sripada - 2014 - British Journal of Aesthetics 54 (3):339-355.
    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 (...)
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  42. Imagination, Creativity, and Artificial Intelligence.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2024 - In Amy Kind & Julia Langkau (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter considers the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to exhibit creativity and imagination, in light of recent advances in generative AI and the use of deep neural networks (DNNs). Reasons for doubting that AI exhibits genuine creativity or imagination are considered, including the claim that the creativity of an algorithm lies in its developer, that generative AI merely reproduces patterns in its training data, and that AI is lacking in a necessary feature for creativity or imagination, (...)
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  43. Imaginative Hopes and Other Desires.Kyle Blumberg & Margot Strohminger - forthcoming - Analysis.
    Reflecting on our engagement with fiction has compelled some theorists to expand the domain of the mental. They have posited a novel conative state, so-called “i-desire”. The central thesis of this approach is that i-desire relates to imagination in the same way as desire relates to belief. We formulate principles which are plausible consequences of this thesis. We then put pressure on these principles by focusing on desire concepts such as hoping, and show that the imaginative analogues of these (...)
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  44. The Heterogeneity of the Imagination.Amy Kind - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (1):141-159.
    Imagination has been assigned an important explanatory role in a multitude of philosophical contexts. This paper examines four such contexts: mindreading, pretense, our engagement with fiction, and modal epistemology. Close attention to each of these contexts suggests that the mental activity of imagining is considerably more heterogeneous than previously realized. In short, no single mental activity can do all the explanatory work that has been assigned to imagining.
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  45. Imagination and the Self.Dilip Ninan - 2016 - In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination. New York: Routledge.
    This essay surveys some of the literature on "imagining oneself to be another," and offers a theory of the content of such imaginings.
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  46. Imaginative Resistance and Modal Knowledge.Daniel Nolan - 2020 - Res Philosophica 97 (4):661-685.
    Readers of fictions sometimes resist taking certain kinds of claims to be true according to those fictions, even when they appear explicitly or follow from applying ordinary principles of interpretation. This "imaginative resistance" is often taken to be significant for a range of philosophical projects outside aesthetics, including giving us evidence about what is possible and what is impossible, as well as the limits of conceivability, or readers' normative commitments. I will argue that this phenomenon cannot do the theoretical work (...)
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  47. Imagining what you intend.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2024 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 5.
    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 (...)
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  48. Imagining fictional contradictions.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3169-3188.
    It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...)
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  49. Imagination and Action.Neil Van Leeuwen - 2016 - In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination. New York: Routledge. pp. 286-299.
    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 (...)
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  50. Imagination, Metaphysical Modality, and Modal Psychology.Michael Omoge - 2021 - In Amy Kind & Christopher Badura (eds.), Epistemic Uses of Imagination. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 79-99.
    I develop a psychological account for how it is that we use imagination to metaphysically modalize, i.e., to reach conclusions about metaphysical modality. Specifically, I argue that Nichols and Stich’s (2003) cognitive theory of imagination can be extended to metaphysical modalizing. I then use the extension to explicate philosophical disagreements about whether a scenario is metaphysically possible. Thereafter, I address Nichols’ (2006) objection that psychologizing imagination makes it clear that imagination is unreliable when used to metaphysically (...)
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