Taming the runabout imagination ticket

Abstract

The 'puzzle of imaginative use' (Kind and Kung in Knowledge through imagination, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016) asks: given that imagination is arbitrary escape from reality, how can it have any epistemic value? In particular, imagination seems to be logically anarchic, like a runabout inference ticket: one who imagines A may also imagine whatever B pops to one's mind by free mental association. This paper argues that at least a certain kind of imaginative exercisereality-oriented mental simulation-is not logically anarchic. Showing this is part of the task of solving the puzzle. Six plausible features of imagination, so understood, are listed. Then a formal semantics is provided, whose patterns of logical validity and invalidity model the six features.

Voluntary Imagination: A Fine-Grained Analysis

“…The content of ROMS is goal-driven and question-based. This item was left unexplored in Berto (2018a), but it is of the greatest importance. Acts of ROMS have a purpose (Fraude-Koivisto, Wuerz & Gollwitzer, 2009), which can be understood via the question or issue the agent performing them aims to answer.…”

“…The idea is the one of minimal alteration of how we believe reality to be (given the input), flagged in §2, ROMS feature 3. In Berto (2018b), this is modeled via a system of nested spheres of worlds in the style of Lewis (1973)'s semantics for counterfactuals, but interpreted as representing not degrees of objective similarity, but degrees of subjective plausibility, as in the (Grove, 1988) reformulation of the spheres popular in doxastic logic and belief revision literature. We keep things simpler here by not adding the spheres to our models.…”

“…Imagination as ROMS. This list of features slightly modifies and complements the one initially considered in Berto (2018a). The items in the list have been proposed by researchers on imagination, mental simulation, and pretence, both in philosophy and in cognitive psychology.…”

The Problem of Modally Bad Company

“…For example, Geirsson (2005) -"[w]hat is important is that regardless of whether one uses propositional or pictorial imaging one can construct scenarios" (p. 293, original emphasis) -and Dohrn (2019) -"[o]ne is justified to believe that p is possible if one entertains a suitably concrete and consistent representation of a world which one takes to verify p" (p. 8). To give a sense of how widespread the idea is, the following authors also discuss (and sometimes defend) theories that, according to the above definition, are theories of QALC imagination: Kripke (1980); Gregory (2004); Byrne (2007); Fiocco (2007); Stoljar (2007); Doggett & Stoljar (2010); Gregory (2010); Kung (2010); Hartl (2016); Lam (2017);Berto (2018). 15 The linguistic content does a lot of work in these theories, so let us discuss it in a bit more detail.…”

Imagination in Scientific Practice

“… Dubrow (1982) rejects the idea that genres have a deterministic impact, or that readers' reaction to them can be codified in an 'if/then' pattern; rather, she suggests a genre might be usefully compared to a human personality, not least in displaying certain traits in different ways and in incorporating traits from different personality types while still conforming to one such type (ibid., p. 117).19 It has also been argued that some kinds of imaginative exercises do follow a certain kind of logic(Berto 2018). Having said that, such a 'logic' and the relevant constraints more generally should be understood as context specific and not straightforwardly generalisable as norms(Stuart forthcomingb).…”