Table Of Content

Epistemic Uses of Imagination “This is a stunning and original collection of essays on imagination. It will advance discussions in epistemology, aesthetics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and even philosophy of science.” – Neil Van Leeuwen, Georgia State University, USA This book explores a topic that has recently become the subject of in- creased philosophical interest: how can imagination be put to epistemic use? Though imagination has long been invoked in contexts of modal knowledge, in recent years philosophers have begun to explore its capac- ity to play an epistemic role in a variety of other contexts as well. In this collection, the contributors address an assortment of issues relating to epistemic uses of imagination, and in particular, they take up the ways in which our imaginings must be constrained so as to justify beliefs and give rise to knowledge. These constraints are explored across several different contexts in which imagination is appealed to for jus- tifcation, namely reasoning, modality and modal knowledge, thought experiments, and knowledge of self and others. Taken as a whole, the contributions in this volume break new ground in explicating when and how imagination can be epistemically useful. Epistemic Uses of Imagination will be of interest to scholars and ad- vanced students who are working on imagination, as well as those working more broadly in epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind. Christopher Badura is a PhD student in philosophy at the Ruhr Univer- sity Bochum, Germany, working on logics of imagination. His research interest is philosophical logic and its application to philosophical issues concerning imagination. Amy Kind is Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, where she also serves as Director of the Gould Cen- ter for Humanistic Studies. In addition to authoring the introductory textbooks Persons and Personal Identity and Philosophy of Mind: The Basics, she has edited Philosophy of Mind in the 20th and 21th Centu- ries, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, and (with Peter Kung) Knowledge Through Imagination. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy Extimate Technology Self-Formation in a Technological World Ciano Aydin Modes of Truth The Unifed Approach to Truth, Modality, and Paradox Edited by Carlo Nicolai and Johannes Stern Practices of Reason Fusing the Inferentialist and Scientifc Image Ladislav Koreň Social Trust Edited by Kevin Vallier and Michael Weber Green Leviathan or the Poetics of Political Liberty Navigating Freedom in the Age of Climate Change and Artifcial Intelligence Mark Coeckelbergh The Social Institution of Discursive Norms Historical, Naturalistic, and Pragmatic Perspectives Edited by Leo Townsend, Preston Stovall, and Hans Bernard Schmid Epistemic Uses of Imagination Edited by Christopher Badura and Amy Kind Political Philosophy from an Intercultural Perspective Power Relations in a Global World Edited by Blanca Boteva-Richter, Sarhan Dhouib, and James Garrison For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720 Epistemic Uses of Imagination Edited by Christopher Badura and Amy Kind First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Christopher Badura and Amy Kind to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-48056-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-01893-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-04197-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra Contents Introduction: The Epistemic Role of Imagination 1 CHRISTOPHER BADURA AND AMY KIND SECTION I Modality and Modal Knowledge 21 1 Why We Need Something Like Imagery 23 PETER KUNG 2 An Imaginative Person’s Guide to Objective Modality 44 DEREK LAM 3 Crossing Rivers: Imagination and Real Possibilities 63 REBECCA HANRAHAN 4 Imagination, Metaphysical Modality, and Modal Psychology 79 MICHAEL OMOGE SECTION II Reasoning 101 5 Reasoning with Imagination 103 JOSHUA MYERS 6 Equivalence in Imagination 122 FRANCESCO BERTO 7 How Imagination Can Justify 141 CHRISTOPHER BADURA vi Contents 8 Imagination, Inference, and Apriority 160 ANTONELLA MALLOZZI SECTION III Thought Experiments 181 9 Narratives and Thought Experiments: Restoring the Role of Imagination 183 MARGHERITA ARCANGELI 10 Two Ways of Imagining Galileo’s Experiment 202 MARGOT STROHMINGER 11 Attention to Details: Imagination, Attention, and Epistemic Significance 218 ERIC PETERSON SECTION IV Understanding Self and Others 235 12 Bridging the Divide: Imagining Across Experiential Perspectives 237 AMY KIND 13 On Imagining Being Someone Else 260 JULIA LANGKAU 14 “Imagine If They Did That to You!”: The Complexity of Empathy 279 LUKE ROELOFS 15 Imagination, Selves, and Knowledge of Self: Pessoa’s Dreams in The Book of Disquiet 298 NICK WILTSHER AND BENCE NANAY Notes on Contributors 319 Index 323 Introduction The Epistemic Role of Imagination Christopher Badura and Amy Kind Oftentimes imagination is used for fanciful purposes, from games of pretense to daydreams to fantasies. Playful children imagine that the foor between the couches is covered with hot lava, angry teenagers imagine storming out of the house and escaping the tyranny of their parents, and overworked adults imagine themselves drinking moji- tos on the beach as a respite from the tedium of their daily lives. But other times imagination is used for more down-to-earth purposes. It is employed in efforts to predict and explain other people’s behavior, in decision-making contexts, and planning for the future. As a lovestruck teen, one might imagine how a particular conversational salvo will go over with a prospective love interest; years later, that former teenager might draw on imagination in an effort to fgure out how best to ma- nipulate a big couch they’ve just purchased so it will ft through the doorway to their frst apartment. This volume focuses on these latter uses of imagination, what we here refer to as epistemic uses of imagination.1 Philosophical interest in the epistemic usefulness of imagination has recently blossomed.2 Although there are a number of philosophers who remain skeptical, the claim that imagination has an important role to play in the epistemic domain now enjoys considerable support.3 How best to articulate that role and what explains the ability of imagination to play it remain largely open questions, however. It is these kinds of questions that are explored in this volume. We have chosen to organize the volume by epistemic context. The ffteen chapters have been divided into four sections, each of which focuses on a particular context in which imagination seems to have epistemic usefulness: modality and modal knowledge, reasoning, thought experiments, and understanding self and others. However, in this introduction, we provide a general discussion of three themes that unite the chapters across sections. The frst part focuses on the themes themselves; the second part focuses on the individual chapters in more detail and, in doing so, aims to highlight how they pick up these various themes. 2 Christopher Badura and Amy Kind I.1 Key Themes One notion that has featured prominently in recent discussions of imagination’s epistemic usefulness is that of constraint. It is generally agreed that imagination must be in some way constrained in order to be epistemically useful. Here it may be helpful to compare perception. Perception is, by its nature, world-sensitive. It tracks changes in the world. Changes to an ob- ject that one is seeing will cause changes to one’s perceptions of it. One way to describe this world-sensitivity would be in terms of constraint: perception is, by its nature, constrained by the world. And it’s precisely in virtue of this constraint that perception is epistemically useful. In contrast, imagination is not world-sensitive. An act of imagining typically fails to track changes in the worldly objects with which it is concerned and can diverge dramatically from the actual facts about them. It’s this lack of world-sensitivity that, traditionally, led many philosophers to dismiss imagination as epistemically irrelevant.4 But many recent discussions have suggested that imaginings can be, and often are, governed by constraints – even if these constraints are not provided by the world in the same way as they are in the case of perception. It’s precisely in virtue of these constraints – some architectural and some set by the imaginer – that imaginings can be epistemically useful.5 Imaginative projects typically start from some initial content that then unfolds to some further content. Although sometimes the unfolding process happens almost automatically, in many cases the imaginer takes active control of the process (see Langland-Hassan (2016) for discussion). In epistemic uses of imagination, constraints need to be operative at both stages of this process. The initial content must be appropriately constrained and the unfolding process also needs to be appropriately constrained. Throughout this volume, authors attend to these issues – some focusing on constraints of the frst sort, some on constraints of the second sort, and some on both. We see particular attention to the unfolding process in most of the chapters in Section II of the volume, a section dedicated to issues concerning reasoning. For example, although there is widespread agreement that unfolding must be constrained by logic in order for an imagining to be epistemically useful, there are questions about how the logic of imagination should best be specifed – questions that are addressed in the contribution by Franz Berto (Chapter 6). In contrast, there is a focus on the constraints governing the initial content in most of the chapters in Section IV of the volume – the section dedicated to issues concerning knowledge of self and others. For example, in focusing on how exactly we should understand perspective-taking, both Julia Langkau (Chap- ter 13) and Luke Roelofs (Chapter 14) address issues relating to how we should specify the kind of imaginative endeavor in which we are Introduction 3 engaged. Nick Wiltsher and Bence Nanay (Chapter 15) discuss the way that one’s reality constrains what imaginative projects are available to one. In other sections of the volume, Peter Kung’s discussion of the im- portance of mental imagery for the epistemology of modality (Chapter 1) and Margot Strohminger’s discussion of how we can best understand Galileo’s thought experiment (Chapter 10) also take up issues related to the constraints that must be in place in setting the initial content of one’s imaginative project. The better one is at setting appropriate constraints on one’s imagination, the more likely one is to succeed in putting imagination to epistemic use. This fact brings us to a second theme that runs throughout the volume, namely that imagination is best thought of within a framework that treats it as a skill. Constraint-setting and obeying constraints are activities that one can be better or worse at, and imagining is correspondingly an activity that one can be better or worse at. This feature – that is, the fact that people differ with respect to how good they are at it – is one of the paradigmatic features of activities that are skills. Drawing upon an analysis recently offered by Amy Kind, we can say that skills are natu- rally thought of as activities that can be done more or less well, that are under one’s intentional control, and that can be improved via practice and training – all features that are shared by imagining (Kind, 2020a). The skill associated with epistemic uses of imagination may well be different from the skill associated with more fantastical uses of imagination. When we imagine in contexts of daydreaming or make-believe, for example, we are using imagination to move beyond the world in which we live. But when we imagine in contexts of thought experimentation, mindreading, and the epistemology of modality, we are typically trying to learn something about the world in which we live. Someone who is very skilled at imagination in the more fantastical contexts is good at unshackling their imagination and letting it roam free of reality, dis- connecting from it. Someone who is very skilled at imagination in the epistemic contexts is good at tethering their imagination to reality in just the right way that they can learn from it. This again highlights the connection between the frst theme and this second one. With respect to fantastical uses of imagination, skill relies on the removal of constraints, and often these constraints are ones that other imaginers assume without question. With respect to epistemic uses of imagination, skill relies on the imposition of constraints, and often these constraints are ones that escape the attention of other imaginers. While the frst theme we discussed – that relating to constraints – is explicitly taken up in many of the chapters of the volume, this second theme is often more implicit. But there are several places where it comes to the forefront. Consider Amy Kind’s discussion (Chapter 12) about bridging epistemic divides. When it comes to the question of whether an imaginer can have epistemic access to experiential perspectives other