How Imagination Informs
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4351310 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Joshua Myers (0000-0002-2803-1939, Universitat de Barcelona, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 75 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 167-189 |
| Publication date | 2024-11-27 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Philosophical Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8094 • E-ISSN: 1467-9213 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/pq/pqad118 |
| OpenAlex | W4389924261 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 41 |
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 idea is that analog representations represent relations 'for free', and this explains how the imagination can contain more information than is put into it. This account makes important contributions to both philosophy of mind, by showing how the imagination can generate new content that is not represented by a subject's antecedent mental states, and epistemology, by showing how the imagination can generate new justification that is not conferred by a subject's antecedent evidence
Antecedent (behavioral psychology) · Epistemology · Imagination · Power (physics) · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Virtue · Computer Science · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology · Social Psychology
The Primacy of Metaphysics
Languages of Art
The Case for Mental Imagery
Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects
I — Paul Boghossian
The epistemic status of the imagination
The structure of analog representation
Imagination as a generative source of justification
Imaginative Constraints and Generative Models
Logic and reasoning
Towards a dual process epistemology of imagination
Ideal rationality and logical omniscience
The Unreliability of Naive Introspection
The epistemic imagination revisited
Imaginative Attitudes
The Psychology of Imagination
Imagining as a Guide to Possibility
Galileo and the Indispensability of Scientific Thought Experiment
| Citations per year | 2.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |