A post by Amy Kind

Way back in 2016, Eric Peterson came to me with an unexpected idea:  What if we started a blog on imagination?  I was intrigued, but also hesitant.  Could we really make it work?  And how, exactly, would it work?  But I started reaching out to some imagination folks, and I got a lot of positive feedback… so we started moving forward with the planning.

And then, on April 3, 2017, The Junkyard published its first post.  As I wrote at the time, the blog’s name was inspired by a comment made by Noel Carroll at the 2015 meeting of the Pacific Division APA.  In his words, imagination is “the junkyard of the mind” – a place where everything gets thrown in.  Amidst the imaginative scrap heap we find such varied things as fiction, pretense, modal epistemology, mindreading, empathy, thought experiments, creativity, delusions, dreams, metaphors, and much more.  As I noted, “this same junkyard is also littered with attempts to understand the nature of imagination,” and while there might be some points of agreement about what imagination is, there are surprisingly many issues where no clear consensus has yet emerged.  But my post – and the decision to start this blog – was underlain by a message of hope:

It would be a mistake to consign imagination to the scrap heap, or to write it off as unsalvageable, and in fact, recent explorations into imagination have proved to be both rich and fruitful.  The success of this recent research suggests that we could benefit considerably from continued investigation into imagination and, in particular, from the kind of exploratory, collaborative, and quick-moving kind of investigation that can flourish online.  We know that the blogosphere is already crowded … But given the increasing number of philosophers and academics in cognate fields to whom the imagination is of interest, we’ve decided that the time is ripe for Team Imagination to carve out space for a blog of our own. 

We started slowly, with posts running every other week, but we soon were able to switch to a weekly posting schedule.  When we reached our one-year anniversary, I was amazed at how much we had already accomplished, and then we hit two, and then three … At our five-year anniversary, I wrote a post celebrating some of our achievements but I haven’t done any real accounting on the blog of what has happened since then – and it’s been a lot!  To give just two key statistics, I can report that since the blog’s inception, we have had 152K unique visitors and over 294K pageviews.

We didn’t mark the occasion when we turned nine a couple of months ago in April 2026, but I was already doing some preliminary thinking about how we could celebrate our tenth anniversary next year.  And the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that this milestone deserves to be marked.  It deserves to be celebrated.  And what better way to celebrate than with a party!

OK, maybe not quite a party.  But a conference.  A big conference.  A big philosophy of imagination conference the likes of which have never been seen before!  And thus, I am now very pleased to announce the Junkyard Anniversary Meeting (JAM), to be held April 2-4, 2027 at Claremont McKenna College in southern California.  There is a terrific lineup of invited speakers:

Hannah H. Kim, University of Arizona

Peter Kung, Arizona State University

Julia Langkau, University of Geneva

Peter Langland-Hassan, University of Cincinnati

Daniel Munro, Boston University

Josh Myers. Western University

E. Hande Tuna, UC-Santa Cruz

Neil Van Leeuwen, Florida State University

We will also have a book symposium on Empathic Reason: Imagination, Morality, and the Minds of Others by Luke Roelofs, with commentaries from Heidi Maibom, Aarhus University; Colin Marshall, University of Washington; and Eric Peterson, Dolan School of Business, Fairfield University.

But wait, there’s more!  I am pleased to be opening a call for submitted papers, and we hope to be joined by a whole bunch of imagination folks who will present their work in parallel sessions.  A limited number of partial travel stipends will be available to early career researchers and researchers travelling from outside of North America. I am also opening up a call for proposals for symposia of three papers grouped together by common theme.  If you are interested in playing some other role in the conference – as session chair or as a commentator – don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly.

Philosophical papers and symposia on all topics concerning imagination are welcome, with a submission deadline of October 15.  Full details on the CFP are here.  Of course, anyone interested in philosophy of imagination is most welcome to attend even without presenting a paper.  Registration details will be made available closer to the time of the event.  I am really hoping that this conference will prove to be an important event for the philosophy of imagination community.  Who knows what ideas for future research the talks will spark?  And I envision lots of opportunities for us to chat, build community, and lay the groundwork for future collaborations, large and small.  So please come JAM with us!

With this post, The Junkyard closes out our AY 2025-26 year – but we will be back in late August with another series of great posts, and I’ll report on further details about JAM once I have them.  Have a wonderfully productive and imaginative summer!

p.s. Is this the first of more JAMs to come?  That’s not my current plan.  But the last time I thought I was organizing a one-off conference, I ended up with a five-year series.  In any case, whatever happens with JAM, I can promise that I’m committed to steering The Junkyard into its second decade.  I can’t promise that I will still be at its helm when it hits its 20th anniversary, but I’m not ready to hang up the towel quite yet.

A post by Angelica Kaufmann

“Our heart-beats, our breathing, the pulses of our attention, fragments of words or sentences that pass through our imagination, are what people this dim habitat. … In short, empty our minds as we may, some form of changing process remains for us to feel, and cannot be expelled.”

— William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Ch. XV, “The Perception of Time,” section “We have no sense for empty time”

Mental life is not always equally full or equally structured. Sometimes thought is busy, vivid, and difficult to interrupt. A useful example is intrusive mental imagery. In conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, intrusive images can be especially vivid, affectively charged, and hard to regulate (Brewin et al., 2010). They show one way in which some conscious experience can become highly salient and difficult to step back from.

But some conscious mental life can also seem to vary in the opposite direction. Sometimes, instead of becoming overly full, it appears to lose structure altogether. Many people recognise the experience: you are reading a page, listening to someone speak, or waiting at a traffic light, and then suddenly realise that your mind seems to have gone blank. Not wandering somewhere else. Not replaying a memory. Not imagining tomorrow’s lunch. Just — nothing.

Or at least, that is how it seems.

Cognitive scientists and philosophers call this phenomenon mind blanking (James, 1980). The standard reports are familiar: “I was thinking of nothing,” “my mind went away,” “there was nothing in my head”. But once we look more closely, things become less straightforward. Does mind blanking involve a real interruption of conscious experience? Is it a failure of attention? A failure of access? A failure of report? Or is it a family of different states that all get compressed into the same ordinary description: my mind went blank?

One reason the phenomenon is interesting is that a report of “nothing” does not by itself settle what was happening in the episode itself. A lack of reportable content is not obviously the same as a lack of conscious content (Kaufmann et al., 2024). That distinction raises more than one possibility. Some cases of mind blanking may indeed involve a genuine lapse or interruption. But others may involve forms of consciousness that are present, yet too thin, too unstable, or too poorly structured to be recoverable afterwards.

This is one reason the topic is philosophically important. It pushes against a familiar assumption: that if a subject cannot report any content, there must have been no content there to begin with. That inference may be too quick. Sometimes what is missing may be structure, stability, or reportability, rather than consciousness itself.

But that cannot be the whole story.

Part of the difficulty is methodological. Most studies identify mind blanking through self-report, often using experience-sampling or probe-caught methods (Ward & Wegner, 2013; Kawagoe et al., 2019). Participants are interrupted during a task and asked what was on their mind just before the probe. If they say “nothing,” we classify the episode as mind blanking. Yet a report of “nothing” is already a retrospective judgement. It tells us how the subject later characterises the episode; it does not straightforwardly reveal what the first-order state itself was like. As Fell (2022) notes, this is part of what makes the phenomenon conceptually slippery.

Recent empirical work suggests that there may be more than one mechanism behind mind blanking. EEG studies show that some instances seem connected to low arousal, slow-wave-like activity during wakefulness, and patterns associated with local-sleep intrusions (Andrillon et al., 2019, 2021; Muñoz-Musat et al., 2025). In those cases, blankness may reflect a genuine reduction in the normal richness of waking thought. Other cases, however, seem to involve something different. With their fMRI work, Kawagoe and colleagues have shown that at least some forms of mind blanking may involve a disruption in access or reportability rather than a total disappearance of ongoing mentality (Kawagoe et al., 2018, 2019). Their work suggests that temporary deactivation of systems involved in inner speech may leave subjects with little verbally articulable grip on what is happening.

That already points to a useful conclusion: mind blanking is probably not a single transparent state. It is more plausible to think of it as a heterogeneous phenomenon. Some episodes may be low-arousal lapses; others may involve failure of conceptual access; still others may involve disruption of inner speech or of the mechanisms that support report. That would help explain why the same surface description — “there was nothing in my mind” — can cover rather different kinds of episode.

Mind blanking is often discussed alongside mind wandering, and the contrast is important. Mind wandering is usually understood as spontaneous thought unrelated to the task at hand: daydreams, worries, plans, memories, images, bits of inner speech. It is typically contentful, even when fragmented (Smallwood & Schooler, 2015; Christoff et al., 2016). Mind blanking, by contrast, is marked by the reported absence of such content. That suggests that blanking is not simply “mind wandering with less content.” It may instead mark a different region of mental life altogether — one that sits near the lower boundary of what can be reported.

This is where the topic becomes especially interesting for the study of imagination. Imagination is usually associated with richness: images, scenarios, fantasies, simulations, counterfactuals. Mind blanking seems to sit at the opposite edge.

As work on aphantasia shows, however, reduced or absent imagery can reveal something important about the structure of imagination itself (Zeman et al., 2015; Pearson, 2019). Mind blanking invites a similar move: what happens when conscious life becomes so thin, so unstable, or so inaccessible that it is later reported as empty.

This is one reason it helps to compare mind blanking with other states that are also described as empty.

A first comparison case is the Ganzfeld. In classic Ganzfeld settings, subjects are exposed to a highly uniform sensory field — diffuse light, white noise, or otherwise unpatterned stimulation. The result is not ordinary perception, but not simple nothingness either. The experiential field can begin to feel strangely homogeneous, unarticulated, or almost empty, even while experience persists (Avant, 1965; Wackermann et al., 2008).

The Ganzfeld shows that consciousness can feel blank without disappearing. What is reduced is not experience as such, but differentiation within experience. The perceptual field becomes so uniform that subjects may describe it as empty or fading. This does not make Ganzfeld experience identical to mind blanking, but it provides a useful model of blankness as low structure rather than literal nothingness.

A second comparison case comes from the literature on white dreams. White dreams are reports in which a subject, on waking, says that when sleeping, they were dreaming, but cannot recall any specific content. They do not report a vivid scene, narrative, or recognisable image. Instead, they report something like: I know I was dreaming, but I cannot say what it was about (Fazekas et al., 2019).

White dreams are interesting because they seem to occupy an intermediate space between vivid dream experience and total absence. They are not straightforward cases of no experience, but neither are they ordinary dreams that are simply forgotten. Fazekas and colleagues argue that white dreams may instead reflect a low-vividness or low-specificity form of consciousness, one with too little determinacy to support detailed report. Related work on dreaming has also connected dream reports to activity in posterior cortical regions associated with perceptual experience, which suggests that the boundary between full-blown experience and near-blankness may be more graded than we often assume (Siclari et al., 2017).

Seen in this wider frame, mind blanking becomes less puzzling and more intriguing. It may be tempting to think that there are only two possibilities: either consciousness is present with content, or consciousness is absent. But cases such as Ganzfeld experience and white dreams suggest a more articulated picture. Consciousness may sometimes persist in ways that are weakly structured, low in vividness, or minimally differentiated.

This brings us back to intrusive mental imagery. Intrusive images and mind blanking may be useful as contrasting cases. In one, conscious content is unusually vivid, salient, and difficult to disengage from. In the other, conscious life is reported as sparse or even empty. The contrast should not be overstated, but it helps show that mental life varies not only in content, but also in vividness, salience, structure, and reportability. Thinking about both ends of this range may help us better understand what kinds of regulation, access, and reflective grasp conscious episodes allow.

Mind blanking is interesting for more than one reason. For philosophy, getting to know this phenomenon better presses on the distinction between absence of content, absence of report, and absence of consciousness. For cognitive science, it suggests that “nothing in mind” reports should not be treated as simple evidence for a single kind of state. And for the study of imagination, it raises an especially interesting question: how much structure does conscious life need to have before we count it as genuinely imagistic, representational, or even fully thinkable?

Sometimes the mind goes wandering. Sometimes it becomes vivid in ways that are difficult to regulate. And sometimes, perhaps, it goes almost nowhere at all.

That is why mind blanking deserves more attention than it has so far received. It is not simply a curiosity about lapses. It is a window into the lower boundary of reportable experience — the point at which consciousness becomes thin enough to look like nothing at all, and that may not be bad at all.

References

Andrillon, T., Windt, J., Silk, T., Drummond, S. P. A., Bellgrove, M. A., & Tsuchiya, N. (2019). Does the mind wander when the brain takes a break? Local sleep in wakefulness, attentional lapses and mind-wandering. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 13, Article 949.

Andrillon, T., Burns, A., Mackay, T., Windt, J., & Tsuchiya, N. (2021). Predicting lapses of attention with sleep-like slow waves. Nature Communications, 12, Article 3657.

Avant, L. L. (1965). Vision in the Ganzfeld. Psychological Bulletin, 64, 246–258.

Brewin, C. R., Gregory, J. D., Lipton, M., & Burgess, N. (2010). Intrusive images in psychological disorders: Characteristics, neural mechanisms, and treatment implications. Psychological Review, 117(1), 210–232.

Christoff, K., Irving, Z. C., Fox, K. C. R., Spreng, R. N., & Andrews-Hanna, J. R. (2016). Mind-wandering as spontaneous thought: A dynamic framework. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(11), 718–731.

Fazekas, P., Németh, G., & Overgaard, M. (2019). White dreams are made of colours: What studying contentless dreams can teach about the neural basis of dreaming and conscious experiences. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 43, 84–91.

Fell, J. (2022). What is mind blanking: A conceptual clarification. European Journal of Neuroscience, 56(6), 4837–4842.

James, W. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. Henry Holt and Company.

Kaufmann, A., Parmigiani, S., Kawagoe, T., Zabaroff, E., & Wells, B. (2024). Two models of mind blanking. European Journal of Neuroscience, 59, 786–795.

Kawagoe, T., Onoda, K., & Yamaguchi, S. (2018). Different pre-scanning instructions induce distinct psychological and resting brain states during functional magnetic resonance imaging. European Journal of Neuroscience, 47(1), 77–82.

Kawagoe, T., Onoda, K., & Yamaguchi, S. (2019). The neural correlates of mind blanking: When the mind goes away. Human Brain Mapping, 40(17), 4934–4940.

Kawagoe, T., Yoshimura, S., Muranaka, S., Xethakis, L., & Onoda, K. (2024). Developing the Japanese and English versions of the Mind Blanking Questionnaire (MBQ): Validation and reliability. Personality and Individual Differences, 220, Article 112539.

Mortaheb, S., Klados, M. A., Van Calster, L., Boulakis, P. A., Georgoula, K., Majerus, S., & Demertzi, A. (2022). Mind blanking is a distinct mental state linked to a recurrent brain profile of globally positive connectivity during ongoing mentation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(41), Article e2207743119.

Muñoz-Musat, E., Corcoran, A. W., Belloli, L., Naccache, L., & Andrillon, T. (2025). Mind the blank: Behavioral, experiential, and physiological signatures of absent-mindedness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122, Article e2510262122.

Pearson, J. (2019). The human imagination: The cognitive neuroscience of visual mental imagery. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 20, 624–634.

Siclari, F., Baird, B., Perogamvros, L., Bernardi, G., LaRocque, J. J., Riedner, B., Boly, M., Postle, B. R., & Tononi, G. (2017). The neural correlates of dreaming. Nature Neuroscience, 20(6), 872–878.

Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2015). The science of mind wandering: Empirically navigating the stream of consciousness. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 487–518.

Wackermann, J., Pütz, P., & Allefeld, C. (2008). Ganzfeld-induced hallucinatory experience, its phenomenology and cerebral electrophysiology. Cortex, 44(10), 1364–1378.

Ward, A. F., & Wegner, D. M. (2013). Mind-blanking: When the mind goes away. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, Article 650.

Zeman, A., Dewar, M., & Della Sala, S. (2015). Lives without imagery: Congenital aphantasia. Cortex, 73, 378–380.

A post by Idil Çakmur

There is a simplicity to a life without the imagination. An unimaginative person might be frightfully dull, but at least they have a firm footing in reality, while the imaginative person is off in la la land, chasing windmills. The imagination, we are ordinarily inclined to think, might make things more interesting, but it does not bring us closer to the truth. It instead traps us in a dreamland of our own making.

This is where Iris Murdoch begins to disagree: “we use our imagination not to escape the world”, she writes, “but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real” (EM 374). When we consider the role of the imagination within her broader moral philosophy, it is clear that becoming more imaginative is a moral imperative.

Murdoch’s philosophy is an attempt to rescue moral philosophy from its overemphasis on action, toward the importance of vision. We act in the world we see. If we see clearly, if we are in touch with reality, then when the time comes, we will know the right thing to do—“true vision occasions right conduct” (EM 353).

The pursuit of true vision is what unites art and morality:

Art and morals are … one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. (EM 215)

As we’ll see, the imagination sets the standard for correct engagement in both.

“Much of our life”, Murdoch writes, “is taken up by truth-seeking imagining, questioning” (EM 26). The operation of the imagination is constant and pervasive, as are its effects: “the world which we confront is not just a world of ‘facts’, but a world upon which our imagination has, at any given moment, already worked” (EM 199). We constantly “add color” to what we perceive. We make connections, tell stories. We endorse particular interpretations without even realizing it.

Murdoch’s account of the imagination is Kantian in its foundations. As she puts it: “imagination provides essential fusion, also gratuitous creation. At one end of the scale is the unconscious activity necessary to experience a world, at the other the free inventive power of exceptional minds. This may be seen as a scale of degrees of freedom” (MGM 309). The scale runs, in other words, from the transcendental imagination of the first Critique, the hidden cognitive machinery that makes experience possible for us at all, to the creative imagination of the third, uniquely realized by the Kantian genius. But what concerns Murdoch is the middle ground which she takes Kant to have omitted: the role of the imagination in morals.

When we settle down to be ‘thoroughly rational’ about a situation, we have already, reflectively or unreflectively, imagined it in a certain way. Our deepest imaginings which structure the world in which ‘moral judgments’ occur are already evaluations. Perception itself is a mode of evaluation. Any account of morality must at least set up a problem here. Kant both celebrates the imagination and fears it. He fears the degeneration of moral judgment into aesthetic judgment, and if the matter is put in this way we can also sympathise with him (EM 314-5).

The imagination is always active, even when we are not conscious of it, and it always introduces evaluations into the world. This means that even when we take ourselves to step back and judge “objectively”, we are still not removing the effects of our previous imaginings. We don’t have a neutral mode of perception. We are on the verge of solipsism, which Murdoch acknowledges when she writes that “each of us lives and chooses within a partly private, partly fabricated world” (EM 199). But the way forward is not to deny the pervasiveness of the imagination out of fear. It is to embrace it as a defining challenge for our moral lives: we have to make our way back to reality.

If we can’t escape the imagination, then we have to know how to separate good imagining from bad. What we have to fear isn’t the imagination generally, but the way it devolves into what she labels “fantasy”:

The human mind is naturally and largely given to fantasy. Vanity (a prime human motive) is composed of fantasy. Neurotic or vengeful fantasies, erotic fantasies, delusions of grandeur, dreams of power, can imprison the mind, impeding new understanding, new interests and affections, possibilities of fruitful and virtuous action. If we consider the narrow dreariness of this fantasy life to which we are so addicted the term ‘unimaginative’ seems appropriate. (MGM 322)

It is this distinction that we have to maintain, “between ‘fantasy’ as mechanical, egoistic, untruthful, and ‘imagination’ as truthful and free” (MGM 321). The clearest delineator between the two is how heavily the process of imagining is influenced by selfish concerns.

Fantasy, in this sense, is a catchall for the ways the imagination goes awry under the influence of our “fat relentless ego” (EM 342). Even if we are always influencing how we represent the world, if we uphold truth over self-interest, we are more likely to get things right. But that is also why we have to be cautious of our psyche and the “almost irresistible human tendency to seek consolation in fantasy” (EM 352):

The psyche is a historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself. In some ways it resembles a machine; in order to operate it needs sources of energy, and it is predisposed to certain patterns of activity. … One of its main pastimes is day-dreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self. (EM 364)

Fantasy stands in the way of our apprehending reality. It does so in mostly self-serving ways, for self-serving reasons—that is why Murdoch labels its production “consolation”.

There are two forms of consolation that we especially have to worry about. One is in service of affirming our self-importance and covering up our flaws. It distorts reality toward something more favorable for our self-conception, like delusions of grandeur. The dangers of this kind of consolation, as well as how we can resist it, are obvious, compared to the latter.

The second form of consolation makes us simplify the world, to pretend that reality is easily comprehendible. It is an effort to remove the unease we feel at not understanding the world or the people that surround us. It makes us reduce complexity into myths and stereotypes, allowing us to think we have a command over reality, that we have “individuals and situations ‘taped’” (EM 87). The danger is that it means we are no longer in touch with the individual in front of us, as they really are, but with the homogenized images we have created. The way to resist this consolation is to turn our attention toward particulars, in their irreducible complexity.

This need to attend to particulars without lapsing into fantasy is the goal that unites art and morals. “Real people are destructive of myth,” Murdoch thinks, “contingency is destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination” (EM 294). When we examine people closely, we begin to see how much we had missed in generalizing too soon — “people in real life are very, very odd, as soon as one gets to know them at all well” (EM 255). Art is important partly because it can serve as a training ground for this kind of attention:

It is important too that great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self. This exercise of detachment is difficult and valuable whether the thing contemplated is a human being or the root of a tree or the vibration of a colour or a sound. … Beauty is that which attracts this particular sort of unselfish attention. (EM 353)

The exercise of detachment is not only a task for the audience, but for the artist. The good writer allows someone other than himself to exist—his stories are not rehearsals of his wishes and anxieties; his characters are not mirror-images. In this way, “the artist is indeed the analogon of the good man, and in a special sense he is the good man: the lover who, nothing himself, lets other things be through him. And that also, I am sure, is what is meant by ‘negative capability’” (EM 284). The imagination is differentiated from fantasy through this negative capability: we don’t add, but remove. We remove our own inclinations, desires, and temptations. We learn to be open to the truth, rather than hinder our search by getting our egos wrapped up in it.

At heart, imagination turns out to be a way of truly attending to the other. It is a success term. We are imaginative insofar as we are being brought out of ourselves, closer to the world. We might not know what that looks like, but we know what it is to be enveloped in a fantasy realm—to be consumed by hopes of success or revenge, to be unable to shake ourselves; to struggle to see others as they are, rather than through our anxieties or desires.

Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination. (EM 216)

References

Murdoch, Iris. 1993. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (MGM). Penguin Philosophy Series. Penguin.

Murdoch, Iris. 1999. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (EM). Penguin Books.

A post by Lloyd Strickland

Philosophers have traditionally drawn a sharp boundary between the province of imagination and that of logic (see for example Malebranche 1997, 87-195; Spinoza 2002, 267-268). While logic is austere, rule-governed, and abstract, imagination is vivid, associative, and often unruly. If imagination has a place in philosophy at all, it is usually as a source of examples, heuristics, or perhaps error, not as something that could itself be subject to logic (but see Berto and Jago 2019, especially chapter 8; Canavotto, Berto, and Giordani 2020; Özgün and Schoonen 2022).

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646—1716) disrupts this familiar contrast in a striking way. When outlining ‘universal mathesis’, a hypothetical higher order science of quantities and qualities, Leibniz describes it as ‘the science of imaginable things’ (2026b, 505) and goes so far as to call it ‘the logic of the imagination’ (2026b, 509). Leibniz is not saying here that imagination itself can be turned into a science, but rather is marking out a class of objects that fall under imagination—figures, magnitudes, forms, quantities, and their relations—yet can still be treated exactly. The ‘logic of the imagination’ is the logic proper to such objects.

To get a better idea of what he means, let’s start with Leibniz’s basic distinction between imagination and intellect. In common with other philosophers of his time, he takes imagination to be the faculty of producing and reproducing what has been perceived directly or indirectly, while intellect is concerned with demonstration, inference, and formal reasoning. Unlike the imagination, the intellect is capable of grasping purely intelligible and non-sensible things, such as those of metaphysics, moral philosophy, and theology. On this account, the imagination might seem to have little value to the philosopher.

Leibniz certainly cautions philosophers against over-reliance on the imagination. Many philosophical errors, he thinks, arise because people ‘are unable to go further than imagining things’ (Leibniz 2026a, 151). They mistake what can be pictured for what is possible, or what is vividly represented for what is true. Analogies may ‘affect the imagination’ without satisfying the mind (Leibniz 2026a, 389); ‘grand words and bold metaphors’ may produce ardour without understanding (Leibniz 2026a, 24). Left to itself, he says, imagination is not a reliable guide.

So how could there be a logic of what is imaginable? The answer lies in distinguishing imagination as a faculty from the objects that fall under it. Taken as a psychological power, imagination may be unreliable. But some objects of imagination have a determinate structure. Figures can be constructed, magnitudes compared, forms recognized, quantities measured. These are not merely private images passing through the mind but objects whose relations can be fixed and examined.

The ‘logic of the imagination’ is therefore not a logic of mental pictures as such, but a logic of sensible representations through which certain relations can be made available to thought. As Leibniz puts it, ‘Imagination generally revolves around two things, quality and quantity, that is, size and form, according to which things are said to be similar or dissimilar, equal or unequal’ (2026b, 509). Geometry provides the clearest illustration. When we reason about triangles, circles, or ratios, we often use diagrams. These diagrams fall under imagination: they can be seen, traced, and manipulated, although the reasoning is not reducible to what is seen. A proper demonstration, Leibniz insists, should not rely on the diagram alone. The diagram helps the imagination, but the proof must be framed so that its validity does not depend on the particular figure drawn.

Yet the diagram is not dispensable, as it plays a crucial role in guiding attention, organizing relations, and allowing us to survey a structure. In this sense, the figure belongs to a disciplined field of the imaginable: it is not a private mental picture, but an object whose relations can be constrained by construction and proof.

Leibniz also hopes to extend the lesson beyond geometry. Where objects cannot themselves be pictured (for example, being, cause, necessity, or justice), signs may still provide a sensible substitute for figures. This helps explain why Leibniz thinks many sciences should, as far as possible, make use of figures, formulas, or other well-designed signs: not because everything is literally spatial or visual, and not because metaphysical objects can become imaginable, but because reasoning often requires something that can be sensibly tracked. Images by themselves can mislead; signs and figures become useful when their relations are fixed by rules.

The phrase ‘logic of the imagination’ thus names a specific ideal: a system in which imaginable objects can be constructed, compared, combined, and transformed according to rules. In such a system, one could in principle reason ‘without any labour of the imagination or mental effort’, simply by manipulating characters according to a formal process (2026b, 356). But notice the paradox: even here, imagination is not entirely eliminated. It remains involved at a lower level, as the capacity to perceive and follow the manipulation of signs.

This helps explain why Leibniz places such importance on diagrams, tables, and structured representations even outside mathematics. In complex reasoning, the mind must navigate a labyrinth of considerations. Without guidance, it loses its way. What is needed, he says, is a ‘sensible thread’ that the imagination can follow. This thread may be a diagram, a sequence of symbols, or a classification scheme. It does not merely assist memory but structures inference, helping preserve order, completeness, and relations.

At this point, we can see more clearly why Leibniz contrasts imagination with distinct thought, and yet refuses to discard what falls under it. Thought, in its ideal form, is distinct, articulated, and independent of images. But human thought rarely achieves this directly. Instead, it often moves from confused perception through structured representations toward distinct understanding. Imaginable objects occupy a middle ground: they are more structured than raw sensation, but less transparent than pure intellect. This middle position is what makes them both dangerous and valuable:  dangerous because what is vivid may be mistaken for what is clear, and valuable because, in the right cases, they can be constructed and ordered so as to support exact reasoning.

The notion of a ‘logic of the imagination’ is therefore best understood less as a rehabilitation of imagination in general than as a claim about a certain domain of objects. Some things that fall under imagination are not merely pictured; they can be constructed, compared, measured, and transformed according to rules. That is what makes them available for science. Signs then extend this availability: they allow us to preserve relations, order operations, and carry out reasoning that would otherwise exceed the mind’s unaided powers.

This idea has surprising contemporary resonance. In debates about mental models, diagrams, simulations, and visual reasoning, philosophers and cognitive scientists often ask whether such representations are genuinely cognitive or merely heuristic (see Johnson-Laird 1983; Pylyshyn 2003). Leibniz offers a third option: a diagram, model, or simulation is not reliable simply because it is vivid, but becomes reliable when there are rules for making it, reading it, and checking what follows from it (provided, Leibniz would add, that we do not mistake such representations for the ultimate structure of reality).

From this perspective, the opposition between imagination and logic begins to dissolve. There is no pure realm of logic untouched by representation, at least not for beings like us, and there is no reason to think that everything falling under imagination is inherently lawless. What matters is how representations are constructed, constrained, and integrated into reasoning.

Leibniz’s ‘logic of the imagination’ is thus neither a romantic elevation of images nor a reduction of thought to pictures. It is a programme for understanding how certain objects of imagination—figures, quantities, forms, and their relations—can become objects of exact reasoning. How far that programme can be extended is another question, and Leibniz himself recognized the difficulty. But the insight remains powerful: imagination is not philosophy’s junkyard, but instead is the domain of objects whose sensible form can be organized into structures that support thought. If that is right, then the most interesting question is no longer what imagination is, but what the objects of imagination can be made to show.

References

Berto, F. and Jago, M. 2019. Impossible Worlds. Oxford University Press.

Canavotto, I., Berto, F. and Giordani, A. 2020. "Voluntary Imagination: A Fine-Grained Analysis." Review of Symbolic Logic 15/2: 362-387.

Johnson-Laird, P. N. 1983. Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness. Harvard University Press.

Leibniz, G. W. 2026a. Philosophical Papers 1677—1686: Metaphysics, Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Jurisprudence, L. Strickland (trans. and ed.). Oxford University Press.

Leibniz, G. W. 2026b. Philosophical Papers 1677—1686: Universal Language, Characteristic, Logic, Encyclopaedia, and General Science, L. Strickland (trans. and ed.). Oxford University Press.

Malebranche, N. 1997. The Search After Truth, T. M. Lennon and P. J. Olscamp (trans. and eds.). Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Özgün A. & Schoonen T. 2022. "The Logical Development of Pretense Imagination." Erkenntnis 89/6:1-27.

Pylyshyn, Z. W. 2003. Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think. MIT Press.

Spinoza, B. 2002. Complete Works. M. L. Morgan (ed), S. Shirley (trans.). Hackett. 

A post by Julia Langkau

Suppose you are preparing for a difficult conversation with a friend. You imagine how the exchange might unfold: what you might say, how your friend might respond, and how the conversation could end. As you do so, your imagination is constrained by what you believe about the world: you picture the actual situation, the personalities involved, and the kinds of things the friend will likely say. But your attention is also directed by what you care about: fairness, honesty, or empathic understanding. These values shape which possibilities you consider, which ones you ignore, and which ones don’t even come to your mind. You focus on ways of speaking that are respectful or constructive, and you avoid imagining saying things that would feel cruel or unjust. Your imaginative process is guided by moral values.

Now consider Judith Jarvis Thomson’s (1971) famous thought experiment, in which you are asked to imagine waking up in a hospital bed and discovering that you have been connected, without your consent, to a famous unconscious violinist whose life depends on your kidneys for nine months. To engage with the thought experiment, you imagine the scenario as it is described: the hospital room, the violinist, and the unusual medical situation. Your imagination is constrained by the details of the fictional scenario and by some general assumptions about how people and hospitals work, but not by others. For instance, there is unlikely to be a musical society who would kidnap you in the real world, and there’s unlikely to be a hospital that would allow them to hook you up. But whatever the exact constraints of the scenarios are: The imaginative process you are engaging in is not guided by moral values. Instead, you are asked to imagine things you would evaluate as morally wrong: the kidnapping and the use of your body. Moral evaluation enters only when you are asked to judge whether you are obliged to remain connected to the violinist and how this bears on the question whether abortion is morally permissible.

A common view in the imagination literature is that we can distinguish between constrained and unconstrained uses of imagination. The relevant constraints are epistemic in nature: our imagining must remain faithful to what we believe about the world, which is why imagination can help us gain knowledge about the world (Kind 2016). In other contexts, imagination is thought to be free of epistemic constraints. I wish to introduce a new distinction which does not run parallel to the distinction between constrained and unconstrained uses of the imagination: Whether (epistemically) constrained or not, imagination may or may not be guided by values.

We can apply this to various kinds of values and to familiar cases. The classic sofa or luggage case is a good example of constrained imagining which is also guided by epistemic values (e.g., Myers 2021). As I am imaginatively trying to fit my suitcase into the overhead compartment, my imagining is guided by attention to size and spatial relations. For example, I pay attention not to shrink the suitcase in my imagination, and not to extend the compartment as I imaginatively store the suitcase in it. In Einstein’s thought experiment about light, which helped him develop special relativity (see Stuart 2020), by contrast, the imaginative process is neither constrained nor guided by epistemic values: We imagine traveling at the speed of light, and wonder what a parallel light wave would look like. As Stuart notes, the scenario is imagined without regard for epistemic accuracy. Epistemic considerations enter only at the end, when the thought experiment is evaluated.

This distinction is particularly interesting when applied to creative uses of imagination. Creative thinking is often described as involving two phases: idea generation and idea evaluation (e.g., Finke et al. 1992). The generation phase relies on divergent thinking, where thinkers produce combinations without worrying about, for instance, beauty or usefulness. However, on its own, divergent thinking will lead to irrelevant, valueless ideas. The evaluation phase is therefore essential, as it involves assessing ideas based on criteria such as beauty or adequacy. For example, an artist may produce several first versions of a painting and then choose the most beautiful one to proceed with. Or a scientist may consider different possibilities of doing an experiment before choosing the most adequate one. Both artist and scientist may either test their options in reality, or in imagination, or partly in reality, partly in imagination.

However, in creative processes, imagination can also itself be guided by aesthetic values such as beauty. As the artist imagines different color combinations, they do not consider all possibilities equally. They are drawn to certain contrasts or harmonies without imagining others. Their imagination is not first random and then assessed; it is, from the beginning, directed by attention to what strikes them as beautiful.

Aesthetic values, like moral and epistemic values, can thus shape not only evaluation but also generation. Introducing this distinction is not only to say that what we value matters during the process of imagining, but also to explain why certain possibilities become salient at all, and why they are being developed, while others are ignored. Value-guidance helps explain the directedness of imagination. It explains why, with so many possible ways of continuing, some possibilities stand out to the subject as worth pursuing. What guides imagination need not be objective value, but what the subject sees as valuable or worth pursuing in the moment. In aesthetic cases in particular, what draws attention and shapes the imaginative process may depend on the subject’s own sense of beauty or aesthetic significance.

This allows us to say something more precise about active creativity (see Gaut 2003). While passive creativity involves the display of new ideas but can happen subconsciously, active creativity involves a conscious search. With the distinction just introduced, active creativity can take at least two forms. In one form, imagination is used to generate possibilities in an unguided way, with value entering at the stage of evaluation. In the other, imagination is value-guided from the start, so that attention to what matters shapes which possibilities are considered and how they are developed.

We can now see how the distinction between constrained and unconstrained imagination relates to value-guided and unguided imagining. Constraints are thought to be epistemic and determine whether imagination must remain faithful to the world. Value-guidance concerns how imagination proceeds. By “unguided imagination”, I do not mean imagination that proceeds without any structure at all. The process may still have an aim or a task. The point is only that it is not guided, during the imaginative process itself, by attention to any relevant values. While the two distinctions are independent from one another, it seems that when imagination is guided by a certain kind of value, e.g., epistemic value, it is at least implicitly constrained by corresponding beliefs. To follow a value in imagination requires remaining sensitive to what one takes to be possible, appropriate, or fitting in light of one’s beliefs.

One might want to object that all imaginative processes are, in some sense, value-guided, since even the decision of what to imagine or which task to pursue reflects the subject’s interests or aims. On this view, the distinction between value-guided and unguided imagination collapses. However, the present distinction is not concerned with the broader aims that motivate an imaginative project or even with ones that keep the project in check, but with what shapes the conscious unfolding of the imaginative process itself. Even if the overall task is motivated by certain values, the process of generating possibilities can proceed without attention to those values, as in Thomson’s thought experiment. In unguided cases, possibilities are explored without regard to whether they are good, beautiful, or epistemically appropriate, and only later subject to evaluation. By contrast, in value-guided imagination, attention to such values actively directs the possibilities considered and developed.

* * *

A more elaborate version of this content can be found in: Langkau, Julia, “The Role of Value in Creative Imagining”, forthcoming in Studia Philosophica Estonica, special issue “Value Cognition in Imagination”.

References:

Finke, Ronald A., Thomas B. Ward, and Steven M. Smith. 1992. Creative Cognition: Theory, Research, and Applications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gaut, Berys. 2003. “Creativity and Imagination.” In The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, edited by Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston, 148–173. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kind, Amy. 2016. “Imagining under Constraints”. In Knowledge Through Imagination, edited by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 145-159. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Myers, Joshua. 2021, “Reasoning With Imagination”, in Christopher Badura and Amy Kind (eds.), 2021, Epistemic Uses of Imagination, New York: Routledge, pp. 103–121.

Stuart, Michael T. 2020. “The Productive Anarchy of Scientific Imagination,” Philosophy of Science 87 (5): 968-978.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis. 1971. “A Defense of Abortion”. Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1): 47-66.

A post by Luke Roelofs

What if the philosophy of imagination held the key to moral objectivity? That idea was what drew me into the sub-field in the first place, and now I’ve gone and published a book making the case at some length. The book is called Empathic Reason: Imagination, Morality, and the Minds of Others, and Amy and Eric have very kindly allowed me to take up a spot in The Junkyard to lay out its core idea: a metaethical theory I’ve taken to calling ‘empathic rationalism.’ 

The starting point of empathic rationalism is the fairly familiar idea of a connection between altruism and something called “empathy”. Seeing things from someone else’s perspective by imagining ourselves in their situation seems to be connected to wanting to improve that situation. This sort of link between imagination and morality has been discussed by many philosophers, most famously Smith (1759/1976) and Hume (1751/1975) under the heading of “sympathy”. And I think it has an undeniable appeal as a basis for morality, because it seems to get the focus in the right place: other people. I should treat others fairly and kindly, not because of a divine command or a mysterious non-natural fact or the formal requirements of logical consistency, but because of something about them. The way we represent others – as the centers of their own worlds, and not just objects within ours – has always struck me as the right place to look for understanding our obligations to them. 

The problem is, this sort of foundation looks like it’s ultimately subjective. We humans happen to empathize with each other quite a lot, and some of us do so more than others, so if we think of morality as something like the demands of systematic empathy, it’s going to be something with a strong hold over some people, a weaker hold over others, and potentially no hold over beings without our particular emotional proclivities. And if we find a clash between our disposition to empathize and the selfish things we would like to do, we might be able to resolve that equally well by acting better, or by quashing our empathy. 

I’d like something more objective: moral obligations that hold for all rational beings, regardless of species and temperament. That attracts me to moral rationalism, which historically has often been seen as opposed to empathy-based morality. Here’s where I draw on a second strand of philosophy of imagination: the recent emerging discussion of imagination as an epistemic tool (see, e.g., Dorsch 2016, Kind 2016, 2018, Myers 2021, 2024). 

The idea here is that when our imaginings are constrained and targeted in the right way, they can teach us things - that is, they can provide good justifying reasons for both beliefs and (more controversially) for actions. Imagining the path of a projectile might justify expectations about its likely trajectory; imagining how I’ll feel tomorrow morning if I go out tonight might justify not going out. Imagining a situation from someone else’s point of view might justify expectations about what they’re likely to do and, crucially, I think that it can also directly justify acting to help them get what they want and feel better. Empathy is an epistemic use of imagination, or what I like to call an imaginative simulation. 

The justifications provided by imaginative simulations are, admittedly, often a little shaky. They draw on pre-existing background knowledge, depend on our own cognitive agency to keep the model faithful to its target, and are prone to a variety of common biases and pitfalls. If we could directly perceive the thoughts and feelings in another’s head, then we’d often be better off doing that. But the interesting thing about other minds, I argue, is that they can only be fully represented through imaginative simulation. This makes empathy (in the sense of “imaginative simulation of other minds”) epistemically indispensable even when it’s uncertain and arduous. 

There is an obvious objection you may have already been thinking of, which in my book I call the Obvious Objection. It goes like this: “empathy may be one form of imaginative simulation of other minds, but it can’t be the only one. It seems perfectly possible - even common - to simulate other people’s minds unempathically, perhaps to better manipulate or torment them. Or, if we insist on calling this sort of thing ‘empathy’, then there doesn’t seem to be any essential link between empathy and altruism.” 

(This is a version of a broader objection to moral rationalism: it seems possible for someone to be both perfectly rational and happily immoral.) 

Here’s where I draw on a third theme from the philosophy of imagination: the role of imagination in what could broadly be called “pretense”. I think that the very same imaginative capacities are used both to simulate aspects of reality, and to engage with fictions and fantasies. Indeed, we might imagine the very same things, one day as a simulation, one day as a mere pretense. The key difference is that in the one case, because we’re trying to model something in reality, we can end up with genuine reasons for belief and action; in the other case, because we are not committing ourselves to anything about reality, we don’t. But the two modes of imagining are similar enough that we might come to mistake one for the other. Sometimes we get so caught up in a fictional world that we start experiencing it as real. And sometimes with other minds, I think, we do the opposite: we lose sight of the fact that what we’re imagining is someone’s real perspective, and start treating it like a useful and engaging fiction. 

I think a hypothetical, perfectly consistent, egoist is exploiting this flexibility of the imagination to systematically treat their imaginings of other minds as pretenses rather than simulations, and thus as not imposing rational constraints on how they act. They relate to other people, so to speak, as NPCs, props or background characters in the story of their lives. They may do this subconsciously, and I think it’s an open question how best to describe this sort of rational failing. But the most provocative description (which I therefore favor) is that they don’t really believe in other minds, even if they think they do. They’re solipsists in denial. 

This “Solipsistic Diagnosis” may not apply to any real individuals - it may be that no real individual is a perfectly consistent rational egoist. Maybe even the worst humans are better understood as inconsistent, hypocritical, or fanatical. But it’s still dialectically important to be have a diagnosis of what a hypothetical idealised egoist would be getting wrong. Moreover, empathic rationalism suggests a sort of warning, that partial, selective solipsism is a more nearby risk than we might think. 

In discussions of the epistemic role of imagination, there’s sometimes resistance to letting imagination be a source of justification, because of its association with fantasy and daydreaming and other forms of thought that are untethered to reality. And there’s something to that: given that we can imagine in those unconstrained ways, it’s important to be able to imagine things without letting them update our beliefs or dictate our actions. The problem is that we also need imagination to understand other minds, and that when we use it in this constrained, reality-oriented way, we are rationally required to let it update our beliefs and dictate our actions. And so as a result there’s a standing risk and temptation to lapse into treating inconvenient reality-oriented imaginings the way we treat fantasy and daydreams. 

References

Dorsch, F. 2016. “Knowledge by Imagination: How Imaginative Experience Can Ground Factual Knowledge.” Teorema 35(3), 87–116.

Hume, D 1751/1975. Humeʼs Enquiries Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed., L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch. Oxford University Press.

Kind, A. 2016a. “Imagining under Constraints.” In A. Kind and P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination (pp. 145–159). Oxford University Press.

Kind, A. 2018. “How Imagination Gives Rise to Knowledge.” In F Dorsch and F Macpherson (Eds.), Perceptual Memory and Perceptual Imagination (pp. 227–246). Oxford University Press.

Myers, J. 2021. “Reasoning with Imagination.” In C Badura and A Kind (Eds.), Epistemic Uses of Imagination. Routledge.

Myers, J. 2024. “Imagination as a Source of Empirical Justification.” Philosophy Compass 19(3), e12969.

Smith, A. 1759/1976. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, D D Raphael and A L Macfie (Eds.). Oxford University Press.

A post by Miranda Anderson

Understanding imagination as something that is not merely brain-bound or individualistic can help to expand our ambitions for the development of technologies including artificial intelligence. Constraints in our intelligence, including our imaginative capacities, have been associated by Richard Gregory with constraints in our technologies; on his view, human intelligence is largely artificial intelligence because of the ways in which our technologies act as ‘mind tools’ that augment onboard biological capacities (1981).

There is a glitch between our recognising the crises underway in the twenty-first century – and doing something about them –  at the heart of which is the blinkering and harnessing of our imaginations. Paul Gilroy argues that online filtering of information weakens our imaginations generating a sense of apathy and loss of hope (2025). Narrow and corporate control of current technological developments exploit and worsen the perceived diminution of the meaning of our lives, eroding the will to challenge it. Ironically these technological aims and methods are propagated by our fellow human beings who thereby exhibit the truncation of imagination they implant in others. Even in the narrowest sphere of self-interest their activities are self-harming and undermine the security and thriving of the earth on which they along with all of us live.

Supposedly optimised versions of reality being pushed at us not only by social media and other online platforms, accustomise us to interpreting and framing our realities in ways that inculcate superficial desires and anxieties. Cory Doctorow vividly depicts the ‘enshittification’ of our virtual and real world domains through the consolidation of tech companies, lack of competition, and failures in their regulation and enforcement of existing laws. This issue is fundamental to all the crises we face: ‘The internet isn’t more important than the climate emergency, gender justice, racial justice, genocide or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we’ll fight those fights on’ (2024). As one symptom of the issue, consider the non-human agents we encounter for services spanning consumer products to health services. Recall your last chat or phone call with a bot – fashioned to mimic, flatter and mine their human interlocutor, while presenting their knowledge as objective, despite the partiality of its data-mined basis. Yanis Varoufakis uses the term Technofeudalism to capture our being rendered as ‘unpaid servants, whose job is to provide our information, our attention, our identity and above all the patterns of behaviour that train their algorithms’ (35) – notably, when attempting to read Varoufakis’ book, I could only do so via a virtual platform that made me download software and then only licensed it to me for a limited period! On your next commute observe your fellow passengers operate in automatic mode while their minds traverse across virtual realms, at times taking liberating imaginative flights but too oft due to the nature of the algorithms directing their attention and pruning their linguistic range instead becoming mired in dross.

There are common features across forms of artificial and human intelligence: an important one is that they both use predictive processes. AI predictions are based on algorithms and data scraped or fabulated out of human generated sources. In us they are based on prior developmental and evolutionary experiences. Some philosophers, including Jakob Howhy (2013), Thomas Metzinger (2004) and Anil Seth (2017), posit that consequently all we experience are controlled hallucinations. Rendering experience in the world and sentient experience as imaginary serves to uproot ethics and fails to acknowledge the diverse levels of resonance across human and other earthly physical entities. Given the brain’s physical nature, not only do embodied and embedded actions in the world ground cognitive capacities, but quantum properties entangle aspects of our minds, selves and world across time and space (Liu et al 2024; Anderson 2023, 2026).

Habitual modes and cognitive defaults minimise energy expenditure, yet repetitive prior experiences entrench the weighting of certain future predictions narrowing the range of our cognitive horizons, as evident in our development and use of new technologies. Consider Large Language Models (LLMs), an area that led awareness of how powerful artificial intelligence can be by widening our capacity to create and assess large datasets. LLMS have entrenched and amplified the injustices of past and present value systems, as well as exposing the problematics of the bias embedded in their datasets, enabling the possibility of re-evaluation of marginalisation and elision of sectors of our society and world. Another conflicted example is the impact that search engine algorithms have on our imaginative scope, seeming to widen our range yet directing attention and curtailing linguistic associations. Frederick Kaplan described how words are limited to merely economic values through the auction of keywords by search engines. Pip Thornton creates works that list the relative values allotted to words in poems such as  Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ poem, illustrating the inflation of terms such as ‘crowd’ and ‘host’, which have advertising domain value.

What further exposes the tragic nature of these curtailments of technological potential are the diverse kinds of simulative practices across the sciences transforming our understanding, which increasingly utilise forms of artificial intelligence. For example, it is through computer simulations of the brain’s reward system that it is now understood that rather than ‘a single mean’ being anticipated, a dopamine array represents ‘multiple future outcomes simultaneously and in parallel’, with this weighted probability distribution recalibrated through each successive engagement (Dabney et al 2020). This new understanding provides a basis to defend the value of the arts for development of our imaginative capacities. Through providing new modes and forms of thinking and being, artworks generate a reweighting and opening out of these distributed dopamine arrays, enabling more imaginative, complex and nuanced future predictions (Anderson 2022). These neural effects relate to what occurs through social play in the young: it produces a dopamine surge and leads to more developed prefrontal cortexes, which are correlated with behavioural adaptivity, emotional development, and cognitive flexibility (Bell et al 2010; Vanderschuren et al 2016; Woolston 2021). Conversely, recent evidence shows that there is a surge in young people with mental health issues in high-income countries which is correlated with excessive social media use through it negatively impacting the functioning of these same neural systems: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the brain reward system.

There is a fission-fusion dynamic between imaginations and artworks: autobiographical memories enable us not only to recall our past, comprehend the present and anticipate the future, but also to imagine fictional scenarios (Hassabis and Maguire 2007; Mullally 2012). In the process the memories are recalibrated, as a revitalising opening out of the arrays of associations occurs through the way in which literary language combines an opening out of associations with literary devices that orient attention and create vivacity. Hence a relatively safe developmental potential is offered by artworks, which can also counteract and supplement the increasing resistance to imaginary play experienced by adults. The ‘weak and imperfect’ nature of our imaginations of which Hume complains in his Treatise of Human Nature thus turns out to be their strength: enabling more open-ended free play (1.3.10.10). Artistic devices then nudge and catalyse new perceptions through acting as stand-ins for the types of attention directing scaffolding provided by physical environments or explicitly used in scientific modelling artworks (Kind 2018), opening up potential for change to ourselves and the world (Anderson 2022, 2026). Yet at the same time as the need for imaginative creativity and flexibility are increasingly being foregrounded as essential skills, even when humans are considered merely in terms of their economic value (World Economic Forum 2025), human artists are being exploited without fair recompense (2024).

C. Thi Nyugen presents games as offering developmental potential: through immersing us in a ‘narrowed evaluative attitude’ with a ‘narrow goal’ we may then shift into a more ‘open-ended, sensitive’ reflection (2020: 221). Nguyen terms this ‘value capture’, but arguably it might better be termed ‘fission-fusion values’: game roles, or artworks or reality are shaped by and shape us. Scope-narrowing in real-life roles can helpfully focus behaviours, as Nyugen observes, but another potentially positive outcome is a self-awareness that increases the capacity to shift between narrowing and more complex agential modes. A similar flexing and recalibration can occur in our fission-fusions with artworks, oft further enriched by the ways they enable imaginative exploration of the complexities and nuances of value systems and our entanglement with them. Nyugen describes other art forms as ‘recordings’ which implies their relative passivity (2020: 1-2). Research on the relation between memory, perception and the imagination combined with the claim that artworks expand our minds suggests instead their dynamic and active playing out across our minds and selves. 

This has ethical consequences: by feeling their way into and beyond the edges of the known, artworks enable the creation of more critical, creative and compassionate thinkers. Of late there has been much discussion about political freedom and freedom of speech, yet without freedom of thought, no other kind of freedom is possible. Artworks enable us to conceive of forms of intelligence other than our own, a capacity which will be more needed than ever for us to harness the possibilities of artificial intelligence to tackle the crises we as a species face. Our imaginations need the limbering up that the arts provide us with in order to engage ethically with ever-evolving ideas and environments, and to resist the mind-shackling nature of mere observance to current ethical norms.

References

Bell, H. C., S. M. Pellis, B. Kolb (2010) ‘Juvenile peer play experience and the development of the orbitofrontal and medial prefrontal cortices’. Behavioural Brain Research 207: 7–13.

Dabney, W., Kurth-Nelson, Z., Uchida, N., Starkweather, C. K., Hassabis, D., Munos, R., & Botvinick, M. (2020). ‘A distributional code for value in dopamine-based reinforcement learning’, Nature.

Doctorow, Cory (2024) ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything’, Financial Times, Feb 8 2024.

Gilroy, Paul (2025) ‘Protest, Progress, and Post-Imperial Pathology’, Resistance: How Protest Shapes Britain and Photography Shaped Protest. Compiled by Steve Mc Queen and edited by Clarrie Wallis with Sarah Harrison.118-125.

Gregory, Richard L. (1981) Mind in Science: A History of Explanations in Psychology and Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hassabis, Demis and Eleanor A. Maguire (2007) ‘Deconstructing episodic memory with construction’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11.7.

Hohwy, Jakob (2013) The Predictive Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kind, Amy (2018) ‘How Imagination Gives Rise to Knowledge’, Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory, edited by Fiona Macpherson and Fabian Dorsch. OUP: Oxford.

Liu, Zefei, Yong-Cong Chen, and Ping Ao (2024) ‘Entangled biphoton generation in the myelin sheath’, Physical Review: 1-9.

Metzinger, Thomas (2004) Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, 52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mullally, Sinéad L and Eleanor A Maguire (2013) ‘Memory, Imagination, and Predicting the Future: A Common Brain Mechanism?’ Neuroscientist 20.3: 220-34.

Nguyen, C.T. (2020) Games: Agency as Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vanderschuren, L.J.M.J., E.J.M. Achterberg, and V. Trezza (2016) ‘The neurobiology of social play and its rewarding value in rats’, Neuroscience Biobehavioural Review 70: 86–105.

Varoufakis, Yanis (2023) Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. London: Bodley Head.

Woolston, C. (2021) ‘The puzzle of play’, The Mind.

A post by Monika Dunin-Kozicka

Imagine the School of Imagination. If you attended such a school, you would engage in various imagination exercises and assignments every day—so that your imaginative skills could be enhanced. Among the daily exercises (performed on a regular basis) would be one called the Prompt: if a student spotted particular objects anywhere in the school—such as a purple chair, a pompom, a standalone door handle, and so on—they would be required to perform specific imaginings assigned to these objects. For example, upon suddenly noticing a pompom, one would have to stop and focus on imagining it growing larger and larger, until it ultimately (imaginatively) touches the very student performing the exercise. But beyond such prompts, which would be randomly distributed and regularly rearranged throughout the school, there would be many other objects and tools designed to support the imaginative growth of the students. The School of Imagination would be specifically designed to enable a wide range of imaginative actions.

Putting aside the fact that the School of Imagination exists (at least for now) only in imagination, the idea of designing objects and environments so that they enable imaginative actions may itself be considered a rather intriguing phenomenon. Typically, things are designed to enable specific bodily actions: chairs are designed to be sat on, bottles to be grasped and drunk from, and door handles to be grabbed and pulled. In his influential book The Design of Everyday Things (1990), Don Norman draws on the Gibsonian concept of affordances to show how objects can be designed to support particular bodily actions. For example, he offers guidance on designing doors and door handles so that they clearly afford either pushing or pulling. (Doors that must be pushed to open but instead invite pulling on their handles are poorly designed, since their affordances are not transparent to users.) Norman-inspired, bodily action-oriented design quickly became paradigmatic and is now widely taught in design schools and actively discussed in design research circles.

What I have recently become interested in are the prospects of imagination-oriented design: how can we design things so that they trigger or afford imaginative actions to those who perceive them? (Dunin-Kozicka, 2025; see also McClelland & Dunin-Kozicka, 2024). Taking into account the School of Imagination thought experiment, one compelling answer is that we can intentionally devise certain objects to prompt particular imaginings in their perceivers—just as a pompom might be intended to elicit imagination in a specific way. In fact, children’s pretend play with props, as well as certain instances of art, can be understood as operating in this way (Walton, 1990). Intentionally devising objects to be imagine-x-able appears to be a relatively accessible design strategy—one that could, in principle, be more widely adopted.

But let us now consider a different approach to imagination-oriented design—one I will call the parametrical approach, as it focuses on the specific material parameters of designed objects. Just as, in designing objects to enable particular bodily actions, we ensure that their physical features contribute to enabling those actions, so too, in designing things to trigger imagination, we must attend to their imagination-enabling parameters. At first glance, this may seem like a daunting task. After all, hypothetically, anything in the world might enable any imagining, regardless of its parameters (and imagination is often treated as fundamentally world-insensitive; Kind, 2018). Nevertheless, taking this risk, I will argue that, practically and parameter-wise, certain things are better suited than others to serve as imaginative prompts.

What, then, are the kinds of things that are likely to trigger imagining? Let us approach this question by first exposing what we usually mean by “imagination.” If imagination is, broadly speaking, the representation of the non-actual (Liao & Gendler, 2020), then objects that trigger imagination would have to prompt representations of what is non-actual. Thus, it seems to me that objects we experience as somehow not yet fully “actualized” may serve particularly well as imaginative prompts: in perceiving them, we may be inclined to engage in mental acts of their actualization. Let me illustrate this idea by considering several types of such objects.

One such type would be mutable objects—objects that can be altered in multiple ways: shaped and reshaped, recombined with other objects, rotated, or relocated. Mutable objects can be continuously transformed, as they do not possess a single, fixed form of actualization. Examples include block-based objects—such as wooden children’s blocks or LEGO bricks—as well as materials like clay, dough, or plasticine. Perceiving such objects may prompt imagination, since we can envisage their as-yet unrealized forms and later possibly manipulate them so that they take on those imagined configurations. (Michelangelo is often said to have visualized a figure within a block of material before beginning to carve it.) Moreover, while physically altering mutable things—for example, while constructing a figure from Lego bricks or damp sand—the maker may be continually prompted to imagine forthcoming forms, actualizing them first in imagination before realizing them through bodily action.

Another type of object that may trigger imagination is a fillable object: an object that presents itself to us in experientially incomplete forms and thus prompts us to “fill in” what is missing by means of imagination. A simple example would be a two- or three-dimensional figure with perceived gaps—such as an unfinished circle that we may complete imaginatively. According to some authors, in so-called amodal perception—where parts of objects are occluded by others (for example, when parts of a cat are hidden behind fence pickets)—we represent the occluded parts through mental imagery (Nanay, 2010). But beyond such cases, we can identify many other situations in which objects provoke imagination precisely by being experientially fillable. For instance, we may visually imagine what is hidden inside a gift box whose interior we cannot see, what someone is saying when we can see their mouth but cannot hear their voice, or how a perceived flower bud will eventually bloom. It seems that there are extensive possibilities for designing objects of this kind.

Yet another kind of object that may readily trigger imagination is a multistable object—that is, an object that presents itself in a perceptually ambiguous way, thereby enabling multiple interpretations. Consider clouds, ink stains, or even coffee stains. We may perceive them simply as clouds or stains, but we may also discern various entities in them: animals, faces, symbols, and so on. As Richard Gregory (2000) suggests, we can in effect “reverse the Rorschach test” and ask which kinds of visual patterns are especially conducive to perception and ideation:

I suggest that reversing the test—from kinds of people to kinds of patterns—might show what stimulates creativity. This is a clear experimental question: which kinds of pattern evoke the richest variety of perceptions and ideas? (...) For a start, one may think of realistic pictures as representing external objects, whereas ink blots and abstract paintings evoke internal creations. Which patterns or pictures are most evocative should tell us what switches us on most powerfully to create new perceptions and ideas. (Gregory, 2000, p. 19).

Even though there is ongoing debate about whether such seeing-in experiences are perceptual in nature (e.g., Wollheim, 1998) or imaginative (e.g., Sartre, 1940/2010), I would argue that, whether perceptual or imaginative, alternatively interpreting multistable stimuli requires us to adopt a general ”imaginative stance” toward them. That is, we must recognize that such stimuli can be interpreted or reinterpreted in multiple ways, and that there is no single, definitive form of their experiential actualization. Accordingly, I would treat multistable objects as likely to recruit our imagination, at least in this general sense.

However, Imagination-Oriented Design (IOD) would not be limited to creating objects that are merely mutable, fillable, or multistable—or to designing environments populated by such objects (schools of imagination included). We can likely identify further, more specific types of objects that may prompt imagination: bizarre objects, enigmatic objects, and others. Moreover, as suggested earlier, IOD would not be confined to this “parametrical” approach to design; it would also encompass the intentional devising of objects that enable different imaginative actions. More generally, IOD shows up to emphasize the role that material objects can play in our imaginative engagement with the world, rather than focusing solely on the internal capacities of the imaginer. It represents a design step oriented toward making our world more imagination-sensitive. Is it a viable step?

* *  *

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Tom McClelland, who introduced me to the topic of affording imagination, invited me to collaborate with him on it, and thereby prompted me to think further about how objects may elicit imagination. Thank you! 

References

Dunin-Kozicka, M. (2025). Imagination-Oriented Design: Why and How to Create Objects and Environments with Imaginative Affordances? In P. Fortuna & A. Dutkowska (Eds.), The Creators of Tomorrow. An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Shaping the Future (pp. 95-116). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004748194

Kind, A. (2018). How Imagination Gives Rise to Knowledge. In F. Macpherson & F. Dorsch (Eds.), Perceptual imagination and perceptual memory (pp. 227-246). Oxford University Press.

Liao, S.-Y., & Gendler, T. (2020). Imagination. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/imagination/

McClelland, T., & Dunin-Kozicka, M. (2024). Affording Imagination. Philosophical Psychology, 37(7), 1615-1638; https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2024.2354433

Nanay, B. (2010). Perception and imagination: Amodal perception as mental imagery. Philosophical studies, 150(2), 239-254; https://www.jstor.org/stable/40856553

Norman, D. A. (1990). The design of everyday things. Doubleday.

Sartre, J. P. (2010). The imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination. Routledge.

Walton, K. L. (1990). Mimesis as make-believe: On the foundations of the representational arts. Harvard University Press.

Wollheim, R. (1998). On pictorial representation. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56(3), 217–226. https://doi.org/10.2307/432361

A post by Bruce G. Shapiro

"There are two requisites in every systematic treatise: the author must first define his subject, and secondly, though this is really more important, he must show us how and by what means we may reach the goal ourselves."

Longinus, On the Sublime 

The two roles

The imagination plays two significant roles in stage acting. One role occupies rehearsal, where the actor imagines sensory experiences to create afferent data that informs their imagination. The second role occupies dramatic performance, where the actor's informed imagination efferently turns into a spontaneous appearance before an audience.

Trópos and opsis. In the Poetics, Aristotle used two concepts that describe these two roles: trópos, meaning a turn or change, and opsis, meaning face or appearance. As a transitional concept, trópos refers to the playwright's process of turning a drama into a playscript, and the actors' rehearsal process of turning the playscript's imagery into imagined sensory experiences. Opsis refers generally to the actors' performance of the drama before an audience. But the term literally means the drama's spontaneous appearance in a performance by actors, whose imaginations create the spontaneity.

Transition. The turn from rehearsal to performance is neither the natural consequence nor the effortless result of the rehearsal process. Rehearsal only leads up to the liminal frontier between it and the creation of a performance, which must be wholly the work of the imagination in the sudden presence of an audience.

Rehearsal: informing the imagination

Iconicity and rehearsal. A playscript is a closed set of iconicity recognizable as classes of signs. In rehearsal, the actor digs into the script to recognize its iconicity. The process follows a hermeneutic circle of recognition, which is to "understand the whole in terms of the detail and the detail in terms of the whole" and, thus, achieve the "harmony of all the details with the whole" (Gadamer, p. 258–259). 

Afference. During rehearsals, the actors use their imaginations to create albums of iconicity for their roles. By imagining the iconicity as a series of sensory experiences, the actors generate the afferent data that informs the iconicity album. 

Rehearsing the iconicity. In All's Well That Ends Well, the following line contains different strands of iconicity (see figure 1):

HELEN…May be the amorous count solicits her

In the unlawful purpose (3.5.68).

/May be/ is indexical. It leads the thoughts of the characters in a specific direction. The actor imagines this action as a sensory experience when she speaks the phrase. Her imagination of this action attaches itself to her memory of the line, just as it sends afferent information to the album of iconicity.

/The amorous count/ is an icon. The actor rehearses that bit of imagery by becoming the physical embodiment of the amorous count. Physicalizing creates a sensory experience of the icon that generates afferent data.

/The amorous count/ directly connects with the next image, /solicits her/, which is again indexical. The actor imagines the sensory experience of this action, which Bertram will later perform. Thus, it points to how Helen will entrap him "In the unlawful purpose."

/The unlawful purpose/ is a symbolic idiom for fornication, which is unlawful in the biblical context. As an idiom, the line is choric, its meaning being conventionally understood by the audience. Thus, it requires the actor's voice and gesture to create the sensory experience of both its symbolic form and understood meaning. The afferent data comprises both categories of information.

Creating a role. During rehearsals, the actors must focus exclusively, intensively, and precisely on imagining the sensory experience of each bit of imagery in all their lines. Exploring the totality of the iconicity eventually achieves the harmony of recognition that underscores the goal of creating a role.

However, this process is neither easy nor quick, and it requires what most actors learn on their first day of acting class: concentration. Actors need to be especially wary of distracting themselves with extraneous interpretive activities, such as noting actions or objectives, or dividing their dialogue into beats, or creating subtexts. Acting and performance are entirely imaginative, not interpretive activities.

Ensemble. Acting each bit of iconicity lasts only as long as its verbal presence. For example, the imagery in Helen's phrase, "the amorous count," lasts only as long as it takes her to say it. However, the actor playing Bertram—the amorous count—needs to watch Helen's rehearsal of this shared imagery. In other words, rehearsing collectively communicates otherwise brief, isolated perceptions between the actors.

Since all the characters in a play share a great deal of the same iconicity, their mutual yet individual experiences of it underpin the creation of an ensemble performance. Thus, an ensemble is not simply a group of actors working together, but rather a group of actors woven together organically by the iconicity in the play they are performing.  

Dramatic action. The nexus of iconicity directs the actor's focus during rehearsal. What is syntax on the page becomes a visual cognitive map of all the connected iconicity:

(May be) > (the amorous count +> solicits her) > (In the unlawful purpose.)

 (Index)   >                 (icon +> index)                    >               (symbol) 

The dramatic action in Helen's line is the movement from one perceivable image into the next. Although the second and third images combine, the imagery of each is distinct. With practice, the actor recognizes the rhythms of this movement as the fluency of iconicity.

While reading initiates the actor's awareness of this movement, rehearsing with a script suspends the experience of its fluency. So it is imperative that all the actors quickly memorize their dialogue so that they can rehearse their roles "off-book."

Cognitive load. Iconicity rehearsals place a high cognitive load on the actor's imagination. For example, Helen has many lines densely laden with iconicity. In addition, the actor playing the role must perceive all the imagery Helen hears, as well as the imagery she shares with the other characters. All of it informs the background context for the actor's album of iconicity.

Performance: the appearance of the imagination

Reinventing iconicity. While rehearsal creates afferent data for the actors' albums of iconicity, performance is the efferent, harmonious appearance of the iconicity stored in those albums. The actors' imaginations spontaneously effectuate this appearance as an ensemble of reinvented iconicity.

Nexus. In performance, the fluency of iconicity becomes a current. So the actors cannot pause along the way as they frequently must do in rehearsal while they are discovering and establishing the rhythm and tempo of the current. In performance, they must act fluently, keeping time with the current of iconicity, which provides the energy of the performance.

Precision. As with rehearsal, maintaining the current of iconicity requires a high degree of concentration, focus, and precision. Precision in particular ensures that extraneous distractions do not disrupt the current. Precision cuts out excess or irrelevant imagery, allowing the essential iconicity to appear more clearly. Precision also clears the efferent pathways of the imagination from the performer's brain to the temporal habitats of their voice and body.

Affect. Iconicity is frequently laden with affect, which accounts for the distinctly emotional character of acting. As Oscar Wilde said, "From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type" (Wilde, p. xiv).  

For example, in another of Helen's lines, she is in tears, lamenting not the death of her father, but the absence of Bertram:

I think not on my father,          80     

And these great tears grace his remembrance more

Than those I shed for him. What was he like?

I have forgot him. My imagination

Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s.

I am undone: there is no living, none,                 85     

If Bertram be away (1.1.80–86). 

In lines 81-82, Helen is in tears, a state of heightened affect. But in lines 80 and 82-83, the affective stimulus lightens as she tries not to think of her father. When thoughts return to Bertram in 83-84, her distress-anguish intensifies again, peaking at the end of 85, "there is no living, none." It then diminishes slightly in 86. This affective flow between high and low levels of distress-anguish creates the rhythm of affective imagery in performance.

In rehearsal, timbre and mien facilitate the imagined sensory experience of affect that produces afferent information, not only for the actor's album of iconicity but also for the affect system. In performance, that iconicity becomes the stimulus that spontaneously triggers the same affect, distress-anguish, with immediate authenticity.

The challenge of iconicity

What remains challenging for actors doing iconicity is trusting their imaginations to provide the creative impulse necessary to satisfy its demands. Without that trust, the liminal boundary separating rehearsal from performance becomes a foggy no man's land. As it is for all the arts, the light of trust illuminates the imagination because it is the most direct route to truth, where imagined things agree with themselves.

References (annotated):

Aristotle. (1995). Poetics. Translated by Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. This much-discussed work is also foundational to drama studies. Aristotle describes mimesis as having three parts, object, medium, and mode. The dramatist creates the object, expresses it in media that actors use to turn (tropos) the object into its appearance (opsis). The three parts contain the six elements: action, character, thought – language, musicality – performance.

Gadamer, H. (1986). Truth and Method. New York: Crossroad. Gadamer attributes the concept of the hermeneutic circle or cycle to Heidegger, but he expands on it in several places.

Longinus. (1995). On the Sublime. Translated by W. H. Fyfe. Revised by Donald Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The work is more relevant to how the voice expresses perceptions of imagery through phantasia, "image productions," "You seem to see what you describe and bring it vividly before the eyes of your audience."

Shakespeare, W. (2019). All's Well That Ends Well. Editors Gossett, S. & Wilcox, H. Bloomsbury, Arden Shakespeare, Kindle Edition. Line numbering may differ in other editions.

Shapiro, B. (1999). Reinventing Drama: Acting Iconicity Performance. Westport: Greenwood Press. Details about the strands of iconicity and the use of Peirce's semiotics are more thoroughly explained here.

Tomkins, S. (1962-1991). Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Volumes I–III. New York: Springer. The foundations of the affect theory of the emotions as alluded to in the present essay, also describes an afferent / efferent system and affect scripts as cognitive information.

A post by Georgina Brighouse

Can you imagine a bright red apple sitting on a table? Or a sunset over the ocean with orange and pink clouds?

These are examples of imagistic imagination. Visual mental imagery, in these examples, is essential to imagination.

A popular view of imagination is that mental imagery is a necessary requirement for all forms of imagination. Classical theories have often assumed that imagination depends crucially on imagery (e.g., Aristotle 1968, 428a1-2; Hume, 1739/2007), and contemporary philosophers have continued this line of thought.

Amy Kind defends an imagery-essentialist account of imagination. On her view, imagery serves as the ‘paint’ of the imagination (2001, p. 33). Just like paint captures the object of the painting, imagery captures the object of the imagining. Further, she argues that the experiential aspect of imagination – the ‘what-it’s-likeness’ – can only be explained by invoking mental imagery.

Bence Nanay also argues that, whilst imagination and imagery are distinct, the former necessarily depends on the latter (Nanay, 2023a, 2023b). Imagination is something we do, a (typically) voluntary action, whereas mental imagery can be involuntary, such as in flashbacks or earworms (Nanay, 2023a, p. 165). Nanay claims that imagery is necessarily triggered automatically during an imaginative episode.

Such accounts essentially claim that without imagery, one cannot have imagination. This view of imagination does have some intuitive appeal: many everyday cases of imagination do tend to feel similar to perceptual experiences. When one imagines a friend’s face or a scene from a novel, there seems to be something pictorial about the experience.

However, recent reports on aphantasia, a diminished or complete absence of capacity for imagery, presents a significant challenge to this view.

Aphantasia and the challenge to the imagery-essentialist view

Aphantasia is the diminished or complete absence of mental imagery. The term was coined by Zeman and colleagues (2015), although this cognitive divergence was initially recognised by Francis Galton (1880) and somewhat discussed in subsequent works (Faw, 1997; Marks, 1973, 1986).

If imagination is the same as or dependent on imagery, then aphantasics should lack imagination altogether, or at least have a very diminished ability to imagine. Yet it seems they do not. They entertain hypothetical scenarios, solve problems, and empathise intellectually – activities that one can attribute to imagination – even if they do not ‘see’ mental pictures (Zeman et al., 2015; Keogh & Pearson, 2021).

Many aphantasics also pursue careers typically associated with imagination. For instance, Oscar winning animator Glen Keane, the original designer of The Little Mermaid, reported an inability to picture things in his ‘mind’s eye’, but was still able to draw and design animations (MacKisack, 2021). There are a number of examples of aphantasics working in art and design despite an incapacity to visualise (Archer, 2023; Grinnell, 2020; HulloAlice, 2019). It seems intuitively inaccurate to suggest that such activities are not exercises of imagination.

Now, we have seen examples of people without mental imagery nonetheless engaging in activities we would be inclined to call instances of imagination, but there also seem to be instances of imagination which need not necessarily involve imagery, even if one has the capacity to visualise.

For instance, when David Chalmers asks us to imagine our zombie twin (1996), or Brie Gertler asks us to pinch ourselves and imagine the pain existing without a body (2007), it is not clear that any imagery would be essentially required. For some, it may occur automatically, but it does not seem to be a necessary component.

Similarly, in affective imagination – such as ‘imagining how she felt’ – imagery may be involved for some, but it is arguably not a necessary feature. One might imagine that one is in another person’s position, to empathise or solve an ethical dilemma, without invoking mental imagery.

This brings us to the puzzle of aphantasia and imagination: Should we say that aphantasics are able to engage in imaginative activities but without imagination, thereby suggesting we were wrong to assume such tasks require imagination? Or rather, should we argue that aphantasics do have imagination, thereby rejecting imagery-essentialist theories and suggesting we were wrong to assume imagination requires imagery?

The puzzle therefore raises a conceptual question regarding what counts as ‘imagination’.

Options for imagery-based accounts of imagination

It appears that proponents of the imagery account of imagination have two options. The first is to suggest that people with aphantasia do have mental imagery, but that it is unconscious (Nanay, 2021; 2023a; 2023b). On this view, aphantasics are able to imagine even though they cannot consciously access the accompanying imagery.

However, there is evidence which challenges this view, suggesting that aphantasics may actually lack imagery altogether, not just at a conscious level. For example, studies measuring skin conductance (a marker of physiological arousal) show that when reading frightening passages from stories, individuals with typical mental imagery show a clear bodily response, whereas people with aphantasia do not (Wicken et al., 2021).

Similarly, pupillometry studies measuring changes in pupil size demonstrate that while both groups respond normally to actual visual brightness, only those with imagery show corresponding changes when imagining bright or dark objects. Their pupils dilate more when imagining dark scenes than bright ones – an effect not observed in people with aphantasia (Kay et al., 2022).

If unconscious imagery were still present in aphantasia, it is unclear why it would fail to produce these automatic physiological responses. Explaining this would therefore be an important task for accounts that posit unconscious imagery.

A further difficulty with the idea of unconscious mental imagery is that many imagistic theories treat imagination as a conscious, voluntary activity (Kind, 2021). On these views, imagery serves to explain what imagining feels like – its phenomenology – even if it does not always fully determine content (Kind, 2001, p. 19). However, if the imagery involved is unconscious, it is hard to see how it could play this role. After all, something we are not aware of cannot really explain the felt experience of imagining.

A second option is to argue that imagery really is necessary for imagination. On this view, people with aphantasia would lack imagination in the full or strict sense, though they can still perform tasks that usually require imagination by other means. This suggests we may be mistaken in assuming that abilities like creativity or empathy necessarily depend on imagination.

Amy Kind proposes preserving an imagery-based account of imagination by reclassifying the abilities shown by aphantasics. Activities we usually group under imagination – such as animating a scene in a Pixar film, responding empathetically to a story, or coming up with new ideas – might instead be exercises of creativity. Likewise, considering hypothetical or counterfactual situations without imagery could be understood as supposition rather than imagination (Kind, 2001).

On this view, imagination essentially involves imagery, and apparent imagery-less imagining is a different mental capacity that we habitually – but mistakenly – label as imagination. Aphantasics are not lacking important cognitive or emotional capacities; rather, those capacities simply fall outside the strict philosophical category of imagination.

Whilst this option would allow the imagery-essentialist account of imagination to avoid the challenge posed by aphantasia, it is difficult to make sense of the notion of creativity without imagination. In ordinary usage, the term ‘imagination’ encompasses a wide range of phenomena that are not obviously tied to sensory imagery. It also feels somewhat counterintuitive to say that someone ‘has creativity, but not imagination’. Creativity seems to imply some sort of output - not necessarily a piece of art or literature, but it appears as though something comes out of creativity that needn’t with imagination.

Similarly, supposition doesn’t seem to really capture the character of philosophical thought experiments. These scenarios are often so unusual or elaborate that they seem to require something stronger than simply supposing that something is the case.

This option therefore risks narrowing the concept of imagination in a way that diverges from both everyday language and our ordinary understanding of imaginative activity.

A pluralistic account of imagination

Perhaps the most promising path is a pluralistic account of imagination (Salis & Frigg, 2020; Murphy, 2020): one that acknowledges the intuitive appeal of imagery-based theories yet accommodates the empirical and conceptual diversity of imagination revealed by aphantasia.

On this account, imagery is an important but not a necessary form of imagination. So, one could imagistically imagine an apple or a sunset, say, but one could also imagine that something is the case, engage in mathematical reasoning about higher-dimensional spaces, and construct complex counterfactual scenarios, without relying on imagery at all.

A pluralist account of imagination serves to modify rather than discard existing theories – imagistic imagination is a common form of imagining. What it denies is that imagery is a necessary feature of imagination, thus preserving the insights of the imagery-based accounts whilst overcoming their limitations.

On a pluralist view, imagery-based imagination is simply one expression of a broader faculty. Recognising this plurality not only accommodates cognitive diversity but also clarifies the conceptual landscape: what philosophers have long called ‘imagination’ is, and perhaps always has been, a family of related but distinct mental capacities.

References

Aristotle. (1968) De anima. Books II and III (with certain passages from Book I). Translated from the Greek by D. W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Chalmers, D. J. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dorsch, F. (2016) ‘Hume’, in A. Kind (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination. Routledge, pp. 40-54.

Galton, F. (1880) ‘Statistics of Mental Imagery’, Mind, 5, pp. 301-318.

Gertler, B. (2007) ‘In Defense of Mind-Body Dualism’, Reason and Responsibility, 13th Ed. Oxford University Press, pp. 285-297.

Gregory. D. (2016) ‘Imagination and Mental Imagery’, in A. Kind (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination. Routledge, pp. 97-110.

Kay, L., Keogh, R., Andrillon, T. & Pearson, J. (2022) ‘The pupillary light response as a physiological index of aphantasia, sensory and phenomenological imagery strength’, eLife, 11:e72484.

Keogh, R. & Pearson, J. (2018) ‘The Blind Mind: no sensory visual imagery in aphantasia’, Cortex, 105, pp. 53-60.

Kind, A. (2001) ‘Putting the Image Back in Imagination’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62, pp. 85-109.

Kind, A. (2021) ‘Can imagination be unconscious?’, Synthese, 199 (5-6), pp. 13121-13141.

Lorenzatti, J. J. (2025) ‘Aphantasia: a philosophical approach’, Philosophical Psychology, 38(4), 1476–1504. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2253854

Milton, F., Fulford, J., Dance, C., Gaddum, J., Heuerman-Williamson, B., Jones, K., Knight, K. F., MacKisack, M., Winlove, C., & Zeman, A. (2021) ‘Behavioural and neural signatures of visual imagery vividness extremes: Aphantasia versus hyperphantasia’, Cerebral Cortex Communications, 2(2), pp. 1-5.

Murphy, A. (2020) ‘Toward a Pluralist Account of Imagination in Science’, Philosophy of Science, 87(5), pp. 957-967.

Nanay, B. (2021) ‘Unconscious mental imagery’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 376(1817), pp 1-9.

Nanay, B. (2023a) Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience. Oxford University Press.

Nanay, B. (2023b). ‘Against Imagination’, Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind (eds B. McLaughlin and J. Cohen). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781394259847.ch30

Salis, F. & Frigg, R. (2020) ‘Capturing the Scientific Imagination’, in P. Godfrey-Smith & A. Levy (eds) The Scientific Imagination: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Whiteley, C. (2021) 'Aphantasia, imagination and dreaming', Philosophical Studies, vol. 178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01526-8

Wicken, M., Keogh, R., Pearson, J. (2021) ‘The critical role of mental imagery in human emotion: Insights from fear-based imagery and aphantasia’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 288(1946), pp. 1-6.

Zeman, A., Dewar, M., Della Sala, S. (2015) ‘Lives without imagery – congenital aphantasia’, Cortex, 73, pp. 378-380.

Zeman, A., Milton, F., Della Sala, S., Dewar, M., Frayling, T., Gaddum, J., Hattersley, A., Heuerman-Williamson, B., Jones, K., MacKisack, M., Winlove, C. (2020) ‘Phantasia – the psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes’, Cortex, 130, pp. 426-440.

A post by Vincenzo Grasso

“Emma was not sleeping, she was pretending to be asleep; and while he dozed off next to her, she would grow more wakeful, dreaming other dreams. [...] Often, from the top of a mountain, they suddenly caught sight of splendid city with domes, bridges, ships, groves of lemon trees, and cathedrals of white marble on whose sharp steeples storks were nesting. [...] And then, one evening, they would arrive at a village of fishermen, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliff and the line of shanties. It was here that they would stay and make a life for themselves; they would live in a low house, with a flat roof, shaded by a palm tree, at the far end of a bay, by the edge of the sea. ”

(Flaubert 2010/1857, pp. 171-172)

Emma Bovary, in the grip of her torment, finds comfort in imagining pleasant scenes, often, as is well known, in the company of her favourite novels, or else, as in the passage quoted above, on her own. The imaginative pleasure Emma seeks is, however, to be understood as a maladaptive response, symptomatic of a profound dissatisfaction with her life. At the same time, we should not make the mistake of thinking that this pleasure is always tied to dangerous forms of escapism or wishful thinking. Taking pleasure in imagination is, after all, extremely common. On a tedious afternoon at work, we may take pleasure in imagining ourselves on a beach, lulled by the sound of the waves and the coolness of the breeze. In the absence of a loved one, we may comfort ourselves by calling up a representation of their face. Or again, after visiting the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, one might try to prolong the pleasure once felt before the sculptural beauty of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by reconstructing it in imagination.

How should we identify the source of such imaginative pleasure? One possible answer is to locate the pleasure in the content of the mental act: what is pleasurable about my imagining is a content that would itself be pleasurable to perceive. Since sensory imagination preserves, at least in part, the phenomenal character of the perceptual experience it aims to capture, it seems plausible to say that, in cases where one takes pleasure in imagining, this is because the content itself is something one would enjoy experiencing perceptually. One would no doubt take even greater pleasure in actually being on a beach, or in the company of a loved one, or before the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa; but in their absence, why not settle for imagining?

Although this hypothesis has a certain appeal, I do not think it captures the only pleasure afforded by imaginative activity. There may also be, as others have suggested, a pleasure explained by the exercise of the activity itself, independently of its content (Feagin 1984; see also Picciuto 2009 for an analogous claim in the case of supposition). As Feagin argues, this is an activity in which we would not take pleasure if, instead of imagining, we were actually perceiving. Her central example is fictional literature, where the pleasure afforded by the exercise of sensory imagination does not necessarily depend on a content we would enjoy perceiving. Some of the main reasons offered in support of this view can be grouped under three arguments: the argument from sensory enhancement or substitution; the argument from neutral content; and the argument from negative content. In all three cases, what we imagine is not necessarily something we would enjoy experiencing.

The argument from sensory enhancement or substitution holds that, given the characteristically weakened nature of imagined sensations, we ought to derive greater pleasure if, while reading, our experience were enriched by real sensations, or even replaced by them altogether. Yet this does not seem to be so. If, while reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), my experience were supplemented even only by illustrations of what is being described, I might say, on the contrary, that the pleasure had been taken away from me and that my attention had been redirected elsewhere. The argument from neutral content and the argument from negative content share a similar structure. Would I really take more pleasure in finding myself before the puddle described by Alain Robbe-Grillet in Snapshots (1962), or before the stoning scene in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1948)? In the first case, it is plausible that the sight of a puddle would provoke nothing but indifference. And yet literature often offers descriptions of neutral contents that still prompt the exercise of sensory imagination: interiors, inventories of objects, scenes of extreme ordinariness. Nothing in any of this seems to discourage the exercise, or the pleasure that may be drawn from it. As for negative content, it is certainly plausible that some readers may be discouraged from imagining, and that the more sensitive among them may even be led to stop reading. Even granting this, however, what should we say about those who, having developed a taste for horror, take pleasure precisely in imagining gruesome scenes that they would in no way want to undergo?

As Feagin suggests, the cases discussed so far admit of an alternative explanation, one that appeals to imaginative activity itself, without referring back to a pleasurable content to be perceived, and thus frees imaginative experience from being conceived merely as a repetition of perceptual experience. If the phenomenology of imagination is not exhausted by being a repetition of sensory experience, how are we to vindicate its specificity and thereby better understand its distinctive pleasure? According to Robert Hopkins (2024), echoing and revisiting a view already introduced by Fabian Dorsch (2012), imagining bears a fundamental connection to agency. This is because, unlike perception, whose character is at least partly receptive, imagining is wholly spontaneous, if by “spontaneous” we mean something that originates within the self. More precisely, the notion of spontaneity at work here links imagining to agency through control: imagining is spontaneous because it arises from that part of the self that is responsible for control, namely the agent. In this sense, the phenomenology of imaginative experience reflects its agential nature. We are the authors of our imaginings: when they are deliberate, we can exercise control over them; and when they escape our will, we can at least try to regain that control.

At least in deliberate cases, the exercise of control allows us not only to initiate or terminate our imaginings, but also to do much more besides. We can shape the development of our imaginings and intervene in various ways in the process by which sensory representations are formed. We can decide whether to imagine from the inside or from the outside; choose the sensory modality of the experience; try to increase the level of detail by making the content more determinate; or heighten the intensity of sensory qualities such as brightness or volume. At the same time, because the representations formed are not as stable as those of perception, it falls to us to try to hold them in place rather than letting them slip away. We may also try to alter spatial relations, or we can draw on combinatory operations to produce more complex, sometimes even creative, representations. My suggestion is that, from this perspective, imaginative experience is rich enough to be rewarding in its own right, without functioning merely as a substitute for sensory experience. In this way, the proposal to locate imaginative pleasure in the activity itself can be understood in light of its agential character. What is at stake, in other words, is a pleasure taken in a particular exercise of one’s own mental agency: the pleasure of imaginative agency.

It is tempting to treat the pleasure of imaginative agency as belonging to the broader family of pleasures of agency (Montero 2016, Nguyen 2019). Some pleasures of agency are connected with movement and bodily awareness, as in dance. But there are also pleasures of agency that belong to the mental sphere, such as those enjoyed by the chess player in the course of decision-making, or by the philosopher trying to bring an additional distinction into view within logical space. These pleasures of mental agency are likewise connected with a form of inner awareness, often described in terms of concentration or absorption. Imagining itself is an experience of inner awareness, one in which the focus shifts from the outer world to the inner one, and it can give rise to states of great concentration or absorption, symptomatic of intense involvement of the reader with the work.

Then, through Flaubert’s description, we allow ourselves to be guided in the unfolding of our imaginings. Thus we first shape, for instance, the low house, then make a flat roof and a palm tree appear upon it; after that, we place the same house within a gulf, by the seashore. Contrary to what others have thought in criticizing this model of literary engagement (Kivy 1973), this is not a “cinematic model”, in which we enjoy scenes passing across the silver screen of consciousness. On the contrary, we are involved in an experience that is agential through and through. Although the discussion so far has focused on fictional literature, the exercise of sensory imagination can just as well be guided by non-fiction, from the cities of Asia described in Marco Polo’s Travels to the memoirs of Annie Ernaux. It might be that, rather than its status as fictional or not, it is the literariness of a work that calls for a certain model of engagement (Langkau 2025). The great applicability of sensory imagining in literature is reflected in the familiar tendency of readers to enjoy how literary artefacts “spark” or “ignite” our imagination. One of the functions of literary artefacts may be to crystallise the pleasure of imaginative agency: to gather, refine, and concentrate such pleasures. In this respect, their merit as “technologies of the imagination” may lie precisely in giving vigour to our imaginative agency, assisting us in the construction of other worlds: some real, some possible, some fantastical.

Even if sensory imagining is often used to provide pleasure in place of a real experience, reducing its hedonic function to that would, in my view, risk undermining its power. There is at least one pleasure of imagining capable of escaping this picture: the pleasure of imaginative agency, which offers an experience that is rewarding and phenomenologically rich. In a mental life partly shaped by personal desires and concerns, such that we often find ourselves imagining something pleasant or unpleasant depending on circumstance, literary artefacts can reveal an alternative source of imaginative pleasure.

References

Dorsch, Fabian. 2012. The Unity of Imagining. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Feagin, Susan L. 1984. “Some Pleasures of Imagination.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1): 41-55.

Hopkins, Robert. 2024. The Profile of Imagining. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kivy, Peter. 1973. “Reading and Representation.” In Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences, 55-83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Langkau, Julia. 2025. “Imaginative Freedom and Epistemic Constraints in the Context of Literary Text.” In Empathy and the Aesthetic Mind, edited by Fotini Vassiliou, Efi Kyprianidou, and Katerina Bantinaki, 45-60. London: Bloomsbury.

Montero, Barbara Gail. 2016. “The Pleasure of Movement and the Awareness of the Self.” In Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind, 178-191. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nguyen, C. Thi. 2020. Games: Agency as Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Picciuto, Elizabeth. 2009. “The Pleasures of Suppositions.” Philosophical Psychology 22 (4): 487-503.

A post by Ana Elisa Ulloa Labariega

Imagine a mobile—the kind that hangs above a child’s bed. Glass figures suspended at different lengths, each positioned in relation to the others. The structure is not arbitrary: it has been built to support those particular elements, with their specific weights, distances, and tensions. At the same time, the structure itself takes shape in relation to what it is meant to hold; frame and elements are not fully independent, but emerge together as a single configuration.

For a moment, everything holds together. Each figure moves slightly, but never entirely on its own. Its motion is shaped by the others, and by the frame that sustains them all. In other words, the range of movement is delimited by the possibilities given by the whole.

But the balance is conditional.

If one figure becomes heavier, the strings must adjust. If new elements are added, the structure must redistribute tension. Changes are possible, but only up to a point. Once something shifts, it cannot simply be undone: it can only be rebalanced. At the same time there are limits to what it can sustain. At some point, the configuration no longer holds: the system strains, distorts, and eventually breaks. Pieces fall to the ground. Some may remain intact, but the mobile as it was—and the structure that held it together—cannot be recovered.

Scientific models, I want to suggest, are more like this than we usually admit.

Usually, models are understood as tools for explanation and prediction. But this way of putting things risks obscuring another dimension of modeling: its narrative character, sustained and structured through imagination.

To call modeling “narrative” is not to suggest that scientists tell stories in any literary sense. Rather, it is to recognize that models organize elements in a temporally and logically structured way, allowing us to explore possible states of affairs (Frigg & Nguyen 2022; Kind 2022). In this broader sense, narratives are not defined by plot or characters, but by their capacity to guide us through sequences of transformation under constraints (Kind 2022). Scientific models do something similar: they structure a space of possibilities and allow us to move within it.

Understanding a model, in this view, is not simply a matter of grasping a representation from the outside. It is more like moving within a structured space. One follows the relations it establishes, tests how far they can be extended, and senses when coherence begins to give way. What matters is not only what the model represents, but how it holds together—and how long it can continue to do so under pressure.

This becomes especially clear when we consider how models are actually used in scientific practice. They are not static objects, but tools for exploration. We adjust parameters, introduce variations, and consider alternative scenarios. Counterfactual reasoning, idealizations, and heuristic scaffolds are not isolated techniques, but ways of sustaining a space that can be navigated in an intelligible and coherent way. This kind of structured imaginative engagement has been increasingly emphasized in recent work on the epistemology of imagination (Kind 2022; Nanay 2016).

It is here that the narrative dimension becomes especially helpful. Counterfactuals are not just “what-if” statements: they are moves within a structured space of possibilities, as has been explored in work on imagination and make-believe (Walton 1990). Idealizations are not mere distortions; they help stabilize that space so that it can be explored without collapsing under its own complexity—think of the well-known example of spherical cows. Even highly abstract mathematical or computational models—such as climate simulations or population dynamics—encode temporal development, conditional dependencies, and transformations that can be followed step by step. They do not tell stories, but they make something like narrative traversal possible: a way of moving through a structured configuration, following its transformations, dependencies, and limits (Frigg & Nguyen 2022; Walton 1990).

This perspective also brings into view a dimension of modeling that is often treated with suspicion: the role of aesthetic judgment. Qualities such as simplicity, symmetry, beauty, and elegance frequently guide the construction and evaluation of models. These are sometimes dismissed as merely subjective preferences or biases. Yet, in practice, they often function as more than that, shaping how models are constructed and understood as structured systems.

A familiar example is Kepler’s early commitment to circular planetary orbits. Circles were associated with perfection: simple, symmetrical, and mathematically elegant. When observational evidence forced a shift to elliptical orbits, this is often described as a case in which aesthetic preference had to be abandoned. Nevertheless, the transition is more revealing than this story suggests. What Kepler gave up was not aesthetic judgment as such, but a particular conception of it. The ellipse does not eliminate order; it introduces a more complex and less immediately transparent form of it—one that accommodates irregularity while preserving coherence. In this sense, aesthetic criteria do not disappear with the change of model. They remain, but in altered form. What counts as elegance, symmetry, or beauty is itself reconfigured by the new structure.

The point, then, is not that science leaves aesthetics behind once better evidence arrives. It is that aesthetic judgment must sometimes be educated by the very models it helps to guide. A form that first appears less perfect may come to seem more compelling once one learns to perceive the order it makes possible. From this perspective, aesthetic features function as cognitive guides. A model feels “elegant” or “coherent” when it can be inhabited without excessive resistance—when one can move through it, follow its implications, and extend it without immediate breakdown. Conversely, what is often experienced as “ugliness” may reflect a kind of friction: a difficulty in navigating the structure or making its internal relations cohere. Yet this too can shift. What initially appears awkward or resistant may, with time, reveal a different form of order—one that becomes perceptible only once we learn how to move within it.

This tension is not a flaw in modeling; it is part of its epistemic function. Models are provisional structures. They allow us to explore possibilities, but they also expose their own limits. When a model begins to resist extension—when adjustments accumulate, when coherence starts to strain—we encounter a kind of epistemic friction. That friction is not merely a sign of failure; it is informative. It signals that the structure may need to be revised or replaced.

Seen in this light, scientific understanding is not a matter of achieving a final, stable representation of the world. It is an ongoing activity: constructing, shaping, navigating, and revising models that are at once enabling and constraining.

To describe modeling as narrative is, therefore, not to reduce it to storytelling, but to recognize its dynamic and imaginative character. Models organize elements across a space of possibilities, guiding transitions and constraining developments. They make certain paths intelligible while excluding others. Working with a model is to follow those paths, to test their limits, and sometimes to reshape the structure itself.

This perspective invites a shift in how we think about scientific knowledge. Models are not simply tools for getting things right. They are frameworks that allow us to engage with the unknown—to explore, to extend, and to recognize when a once-coherent structure can no longer be sustained.

Like the mobile, they hold together only under certain conditions. They can be adjusted, changed, and sometimes transformed. But they can also collapse. And when they do, what we lose is not just a representation, but a way of moving through a space of possibilities.

Understanding, then, is not just a matter of seeing the world correctly. It is a matter of learning how to move within structures that make the world intelligible—structures shaped by imagination, constrained by evidence, and guided, in part, by our sense of what holds together.

References

Kind, Amy (2022). Imagination and Creative Thinking. Oxford University Press.

Nanay, Bence (2016). Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception. Oxford University Press.

Frigg, Roman, and James Nguyen (2022). Modelling Nature: An Opinionated Introduction to Scientific Representation. Springer.

Walton, Kendall (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe. Harvard University Press.

A post by Zachary Srivastava

Over the past five to ten years, there’s been a surge of interest in the role of imagination in science, particularly since the release of The Scientific Imagination, edited by Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey-Smith (2019). As research continues, we can return to traditional problems from the literature on imagination and philosophy of science to see if our cross-disciplinary excursions have revealed new paths to exploring old problems. The comparisons between fictional characters or stories and scientific models on fiction views of models has led me to think about the problem I was working on in a broader context: how do we gain real understanding from fictional models? The question strikes me as highly similar to Colin Radford’s (1975) “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” and the paradox of fiction, which asks how we can justifiably be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina when we know she isn’t real. The similarity between the two questions led me to consider how the paradox of fiction could be repurposed for the philosophy of science. I call this new version the paradox of scientific fiction. This post examines both versions of the paradox, whether they’re truly posing analogous questions, and how this could shape how we think about the relationship between artistic and scientific imagination. 

The paradox of fiction is typically represented by three statements that cannot all be true. Consider the following formulation of the paradox of fiction from Florian Cova and Fabrice Teroni (2016, 930):

P1. We can feel genuine emotions for fictional characters.

P2. We do not believe that fictional characters exist.

P3. To feel genuine emotions, we must believe that these emotions are directed at actually existing objects.

There are a few modifications needed in order to shift the paradox to concern scientific fictions. First, rather than consider emotions, I propose considering epistemic reactions. The phrasing is intentionally vague and chosen to be neutral in the debate about the aims of science when considering potential solutions to the paradox. Second, fictional characters are replaced with scientific fictions; by which I mean things that are scientifically useful, but known to be untrue, such as idealized representations, thought experiments, models, simulations, and the like. There are ongoing debates in the literature over the status of fictions in science (Toon, 2010; Levy, 2012; Frigg & Nguyen, 2016; Thomasson, 2020; Salis, 2021). This too, seems to be relevant to how the paradox might be resolved, so again neutral language is preferable. So, the paradox of scientific fiction can be articulated as follows:

P1.*    We have genuine epistemic reactions to fictional objects.

P2.*    We do not believe that fictional objects exist.

P3.*    To achieve genuine epistemic reactions, we must believe the object of understanding actually exists.

The most pressing question to consider is whether these two paradoxes are really posing the same question. There are two main challenges that are worth considering. First, do the paradox of fiction and paradox of scientific fiction consider the same sense of fiction? If they do not, then it would cast doubt on whether we are dealing with the same kind of imagining. Second, is the broad notion of epistemic reactions the right substitute for emotions? As I will explain in more detail below, I think our focus should be on scientific understanding, but this also seems to bias us towards a particular type of solution.

The first question to consider is what we mean by fiction. Colin Radford (1975) asks: why are we moved by the fate of Anna Karenina when we know she isn’t real? From this, we might conclude that fictional characters are the sort of fiction Radford has in mind. This is in line with the majority of fiction views of scientific models. However, in “The New Fiction View of Models”, Fiora Salis (2021) provides reasons to think this might not be the case. One of the unique elements of her view, compared to other fiction views of models, is that models stand in for fictional stories rather than fictional characters. Rather than saying the Lotka-Volterra equations are comparable to Captain Ahab, we would say the Lotka-Volterra equations are like Moby Dick. Models are complex objects that involve a model description and model content. On Salis’ view, the description and content are distinct and only constitute a particular model when considered as a whole. Salis uses Kendall Walton’s prop theory of make-believe to connect truth claims to the fictional models.  The model description is a prop, like the text of a novel, and provides an initial set of fictional truths. It consists of symbols that prescribe how something should be imagined in a particular context and is used to specify a particular model. The content of the model refers to the fictional truths that can be indirectly inferred from the description (Salis, 2021). This seems like a promising view to hold for both paradoxes. We feel emotions towards the characters based on the descriptions of what happens to them, just as the description of the model guides the fictional truths we can derive about them.

The second question addresses whether epistemic reactions are the right substitute for emotions. The paradox of scientific fiction was formulated with general language of “epistemic reactions” in an attempt not to bias it towards certain types of solution. However, I’m not convinced that different types of epistemic reactions are equally suitable. Consider gaining scientific knowledge versus scientific understanding. Knowledge has a much closer association with truth, which can create difficulties when dealing with fictional models. For example, consider a scientific model that incorporates significant idealizations, such as the ideal gas law. We know that gas molecules do not really behave as the model prescribes, but it still provides us with a greater understanding of how gasses behave. Sometimes scientific progress often requires us to make posits or assumptions that are “true enough” or even known to be false (Elgin, 2004; Potochnik, 2017, 2020).

The non-factive standard of understanding seems to be more in line with the literature regarding the fittingness of emotions than a factive standard would. (Scarantino & de Sousa, 2021; Currie 2014). Understanding generally involves discussions of “grasping” or some other reference to the understanding as a cognitive achievement of the individual (Elgin, 2004; Potochnik, 2017; Le Bihan, 2016). Likewise emotional fit distinguishes between the cognitive and strategic rationality. While it might not be cognitively fitting for me to have a certain emotional reaction towards a fiction, it could be strategically fitting, i.e., in the sense that it is in the agent’s best interest. 

At this point, we have good reason to think the paradoxes are asking analogous questions. From here, the central question I want to consider is whether how we solve these paradoxes could give us good reason to believe artistic and scientific imagination are the same kind of activity. My general line of thinking is that resolving the paradoxes with a single solution would provide pro tanto reasons to believe the two kinds of imagining are the same kind of activity. On the other hand, if we think the solutions only apply to the paradox of fiction or the paradox of scientific fiction, then we would find pro tanto support to believe they are different activities.

I’m optimistic that both paradoxes can be resolved with the same solution. The standard approach is to reject the third premise, either by adopting a realist position towards fiction or arguing that belief is not a prerequisite for emotional reactions. Kendall Walton denies the first, claiming we feel quasi-emotions, not genuine ones, for fictional characters. Peter Langland-Hassan (2020) denies the second premise, arguing that we do believe that fictional characters exist within the context of the fiction. My plan for the project moving forward is to follow the standard approach and reject the third premise. In doing so, I plan to examine how the shift in philosophy of science from knowledge or truth towards understanding could also provide a blueprint for resolving the traditional paradox of fiction. That being said, I look forward to seeing other views regarding whether the two versions of the paradox press us to consider the same problem.

References

Cova, F., & Teroni, F. (2016). Is the paradox of fiction soluble in psychology? Philosophical Psychology, 29(6), 930–942. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2016.1164306

Currie, G. (2014). Emotions fit for fiction. In S. Roeser & C. Todd (Eds.), Emotion and Value (pp. 146–166). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199686094.003.0010

Elgin, C. Z. (2004). True enough*. Philosophical Issues, 14(1), 113–131. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-6077.2004.00023.x

Frigg, R., & Nguyen, J. (2016). The fiction view of models reloaded. The Monist, 99(3), 225–242. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onw002

Langland-Hassan, P. (2020). Explaining imagination (First edition.). Oxford university press.

Le Bihan, S. (2016). Enlightening falsehoods: A modal view of scientific understanding. In Explaining Understanding (pp. 111–136). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315686110-7

Levy, A. (2012). Models, fictions, and realism: Two packages. Philosophy of Science, 79(5), 738–748. https://doi.org/10.1086/667992

Levy, A., & Godfrey-Smith, P. (2020). The scientific imagination: Philosophical and psychological perspectives. Oxford University press.

Potochnik, A. (2020). Idealization and Many Aims. Philosophy of Science, 87(5), 933–943. https://www-jstor-org.uc.idm.oclc.org/stable/48800964

— (2020). Idealization and many aims. Philosophy of Science, 87(5), 933–943. https://doi.org/10.1086/710622

Radford, C., & Weston, M. (1975). How can we be moved by the fate of anna karenina? Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 49(1), 67–94. https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteliansupp/49.1.67

Salis, F. (2021). The new fiction view of models. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 72(3), 717–742. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axz015

Scarantino, A., & de Sousa, R. (2021). Emotion. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/emotion/

Thomasson, A. L. (2020). If models were fictions, then what would they be? In A. Levy & P. Godfrey-Smith (Eds.), The Scientific Imagination (1st ed., pp. 51–74). Oxford University PressNew York. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190212308.003.0003

Toon, A. (2010). Models as make-believe. In R. Frigg & M. Hunter (Eds.), Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science (pp. 71–96). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3851-7_5

Walton, K. L. (1978). Fearing fictions. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.2307/2025831

A post by Christian O. Scholz, Jianghao Liu, and Andrea Blomkvist

In this blog post, we will argue that aphantasia rightfully ascended from a niche curiosity to a hot topic across the cognitive sciences, that mental imagery research and aphantasia research stand to gain a lot from one another, and that the future of both should lie in interdisciplinary research and collaboration. This will then allow us to ultimately segue into shameless promotion for the upcoming interdisciplinary aphantasia conference at the University of Glasgow, IRCA 2026.

Aphantasia, the strong diminution or complete absence of mental imagery in at least one sensory modality (Zeman et al., 2015, 2025), has received growing attention over the past decade and was most recently featured in Nature magazine (Quill, 2026). This increase in interest largely stems from the growing corpus of findings showing that aphantasics are not significantly compromised on a range of tasks that were traditionally believed to rely on mental imagery (Bainbridge et al., 2021; Liu & Bartolomeo, 2023; Kay et al., 2024). This puzzle of aphantasia competency (Scholz, 2024a), namely the question of how people who supposedly lack or have severely diminished imagery can carry out tasks that supposedly require it, currently has two main possible solutions (but see also Blomkvist, 2023; Lorenzatti, 2025; Phillips, 2025; Teng, 2026, for important nuances): 1) Aphantasics are utilizing alternative (non-imagery-involving) cognitive strategies (Reeder et al., 2024), and we were thus wrong in supposing that mental imagery is necessary to carry out the tasks in question (Scholz, 2024a; Blomkvist et al., in press). 2) While most aphantasics do not report any imagery experience, they might nonetheless utilize the same (or relevantly similar) underlying neuronal processes to solve the tasks; that is, they might have unconscious mental imagery (Nanay, 2021, 2023; Michel et al., 2025).

Both of these possible solutions to the puzzle carry exciting implications for the cognitive sciences at large. On the one hand, if the alternative strategy solution is correct, this would show us that we might have severely underestimated the flexibility of our cognitive toolkit in solving these (and other) tasks. If, on the other hand, the unconscious imagery solution is correct, the imagery experience that many visualizers take to be causally relevant for their performance on imagery tasks would turn out to be largely epiphenomenal, and aphantasia might turn out to be a model phenomenon to understand consciousness (Liu, 2026) and what function it serves. Thus, whichever solution turns out to be true, the mere investigation of either path promises potentially deep and general insights into the workings of our mind and the relationship between brain, behavior, and subjective experience. Furthermore, somewhat orthogonal to this main puzzle, aphantasia has also been meaningfully connected with discussions about, among other topics, dreaming (Whiteley, 2021), episodic memory (Blomkvist, 2023), attention (Liu, 2026), and interoception (Silvanto & Nagai, 2025), thus arguably justifying the current ‘hype’ surrounding the topic in both academia and popular news media.

While it is certainly true that aphantasia research is still in its infancy (after all, the very term was only coined in 2015), we are fortunate to be able to draw from a rich and long history of philosophical discussion about imagination and, later on, empirical imagery research in psychology and neuroscience (Kosslyn, 1994; Tye, 2000; Pylyshyn, 2002, 2003; Kosslyn et al., 2006; Thomas, 2014; Kind, 2016; MacKisack et al., 2016; Abraham, 2020). For example, we can trace a line from Aristotle’s assertion that “the mind never thinks without an image” to the doubt that is brought up in response to assertions from people who claim to be aphantasics (Faw, 2009). On that line, we can also locate the so-called imageless thought controversy, where the topic of discussion was whether thought without accompanying imagery was even possible (Thomas, 2014). Somewhat tangentially, we can see Hume’s weak percepts theory to foreshadow contemporary empirical investigations into the neuronal overlap between brain activity during perception and imagery (Naselaris et al., 2015; Dijkstra et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2025), which itself is an important signpost for current debates about possible unconscious imagery in aphantasia (Chang et al., 2025a, b; Scholz et al., 2025, 2026). Similarly, the so-called imagery debate, the debate about the underlying representational format of mental imagery (Tye, 2000; Pylyshyn, 2002; Kosslyn et al., 2006; Langland-Hassan, in press), provides vital resources to draw inspiration for potential alternative strategies that could be used to solve imagery tasks. For even if the descriptivists, who argued that mental imagery relies on a non-pictorial representational format (Pylyshyn, 2002, 2003), were wrong about the representational makeup of typical visualizers (though the jury is still out [Langland-Hassan, in press]), their suggestions might help us better understand how aphantasics might solve ‘imagery’ tasks without recourse to depictive representations (Scholz, 2023).

Relatedly, concepts born from the imagery debate, such as Kosslyn’s visual buffer (Kosslyn et al., 2006), which is defined as the totality of the retinotopically mapped areas in the visual cortex, and which itself is a precursor to the currently dominant blackboard view (Pearson, 2019), according to which mental imagery and perception share a representational format and jointly ‘draw’ on the early visual cortex (Nanay, 2023), are not only a topic of discussion in contemporary neuroscience (Bartolomeo, 2020; Spagna et al., 2021, 2024) but are also crucial for the investigation of aphantasia. For if the unconscious imagery view postulates that aphantasics make use of the same (or relevantly similar) neuronal processes that underlie imagery experiences in typical visualizers, then it is crucial to understand where and how imagery is represented in the brain (Scholz, 2024b, 2025).

But the informative relationship between imagery research and aphantasia is bidirectional. For example, consider how aphantasia research impacts Schwitzgebel’s (2011) treatment of introspection and imagery. One of the arguments Schwitzgebel makes is, roughly, that since subjective reports of imagery abilities obtained via the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ; Marks, 1973) seem to be unrelated to more objective tests for imagery, such as mental rotation tasks (Shepard & Metzler, 1971), this should make us pessimistic about the suggestion that people are accurate judges of their own imagery experience. Now, in 2026, we have ample evidence showing that aphantasics can solve mental rotation tasks (Pounder et al., 2022; Kay et al., 2024), as well as that aphantasics differ from typical visualizers on both physiological (Wicken et al., 2021; Kay et al., 2022) and neurological (Milton et al., 2021; Chang et al., 2025a; Boere et al., 2025; Liu et al., 2025) measures. Thus, pace Schwitzgebel, the lack of correlation between self-report and more objective imagery tasks indicates that we are not poor at introspecting our own conscious experience, but that imagery experience is either largely epiphenomenal, or that the tasks in question are not really ‘imagery tasks’ to begin with (Bouyer et al., 2025). In any case, the accuracy of people’s self-reports of their conscious imagery experience (or the lack thereof) seems somewhat vindicated through aphantasia research. 

What becomes apparent is that not only is the investigation of aphantasia crucially intertwined with that of mental imagery, but the investigation of both mental imagery and its absence in aphantasia crucially requires perspectives from multiple academic disciplines, including those of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.  Arguably, the best outcome may result if the researchers in any of these disciplines communicate and collaborate with their peers from other disciplines. Philosophers, for example, are in the exciting position not only to have access to an existing corpus of empirical findings but also to have the chance to actively propose new theoretical frameworks and experiments, which can then be tested by empirical collaborators (see e.g., Blomkvist & Marks, 2023; Krempel & Monzel, 2024; Boere et al., 2025; Scholz et al., 2026). Psychologists and neuroscientists, on the other hand, can consult philosophers for their deep knowledge of the history of philosophical debates about imagination and for much-needed conceptual clarification. For example, next to the everlooming puzzle of aphantasia competency, a crucial task that faces aphantasia research is the development of a fine-grained taxonomy of supposed aphantasia subtypes (Dawes et al., 2022; Nanay, 2025; Scholz et al., 2026; Zeman, 2025), a task that requires not only careful review of evidence but also proficiency in conceptual engineering and creative novel ideas for experimental designs and diagnostic tools. Another important task that demands interdisciplinary attention is the investigation of links between aphantasia, mental health, and psychological disorders (Cavedon-Taylor, 2022; Monzel et al., 2023; Gao et al., 2025; Kvamme et al., 2025).

It was precisely this shared appreciation for the importance of interdisciplinary communication and collaboration that motivated two of the authors of this post, Jinaghao Liu and Christian Scholz, to form the Interdisciplinary Reading Club on Aphantasia (IRCA), a monthly online colloquium where aphantasia researchers from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy meet to discuss their ongoing research and get feedback from their peers. Now, almost 2 years and 20 sessions later, we have decided to turn the IRCA into a (hopefully yearly) conference, with the goal of not only shining a light on the importance of the phenomenon of aphantasia but also the shared idea of endorsing and facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration. We are excited to announce that the Call for Abstracts for the first IRCA conference, 2 - 4 September 2026, hosted by Andrea Blomkvist at the University of Glasgow, is now open. Notably, the University of Glasgow has a rich history in imagery research, with the first research grant on aphantasia (The Eye’s Mind) shared between local powerhouse Fiona Macpherson, herself a mainstay in the philosophy of imagination, and the godfather of aphantasia, Adam Zeman, being partially carried out at the university, including a big conference on art and aphantasia. We hope this interdisciplinary conference will also provide opportunities for connecting people in the research communities of imagination, mental imagery, and aphantasia, consolidating current knowledge, and elaborating future research plans, where Junkyard contributors and readers would be interested in joining in our quest to tackle the many puzzles of aphantasia.

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A post by Luca Marchetti

One of the best popular-science books I’ve read in recent years is Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. It’s a guided tour of how different animals perceive the world: Yong pulls you beyond the confines of human sensing and into the distinct “sensory bubbles” that different animals inhabit, shaped not just by sights and sounds, but by vibrations, pressures, smells, and even electric and magnetic fields. Along the way, he shows what dogs smell on an ordinary street, what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and how a crocodile’s scaly face can be as sensitive as fingertips – all while telling the stories of the discoveries that made these strange worlds intelligible in the first place.

I appreciated the book both for what it says and for how it says it. But I also loved it for a more idiosyncratic – and philosophical – reason: when I read it, about a year ago, I had just started thinking about the possibilities and limits of imagination in trying to understand other animals’ minds, and about the epistemic, moral, and even aesthetic value that this imaginative activity might or might not have. What I found in Yong’s book was a vocabulary – and a kind of conceptual consonance – that resonated with what I was trying to think through myself: that imagination is something we inevitably rely on in these contexts; that it is often a matter of striving to imagine; and that, despite its limits, it can still have profound value. For example, in the book’s introduction Yong writes that in understanding other animals’ minds, “our imaginations will be our greatest assets”: the “ultimate feats of understanding” always require “an informed imaginative leap”; and, even if the task is hard, “there is value and glory in the striving” (Yong 2022, 13). But what kind of imagination is this? And what kinds of value are at stake? Those philosophical questions are not answered in Yong’s book, and they are the ones I will take up – sketchily, partially, and tentatively – in this post.

An Informed Imaginative Leap

In philosophy of mind, the issue of other animals’ minds has been approached mainly as an epistemological problem in the wake of Nagel’s classic discussion of the “what it is like” of alien experience (Nagel 1974). Nagel’s bat case makes the worry vivid. Many bats primarily perceive through sonar (echolocation), a form of perception that operates unlike any sense we possess. And, Nagel writes, there is “no reason to suppose” it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine (Nagel 1974, 438). The deeper point is that our imagination draws on our own experiential materials; so imagining bat-like behavior tends to yield, at best, what it would be like for us to behave as bats behave, not what it is like for bats to be bats (Nagel 1974, 439). My focus, however, is not the question whether and how we can know what it is like to have the experiences of some another animal. Rather, it is the experience we ourselves undergo when we try to imagine another animals’ mind – or one of its features. That activity, I think, is philosophically interesting in its own right.

Recent work in philosophy helps to bring out the centrality of imagination in attempts to understand other minds and the work it can do in partially overcoming Nagel’s worry, mitigating his pessimism. For example, Kind (2019) argues that Nagel’s considerations primarily target accurate imagination, not imagination simpliciter: the fact that our efforts fail to teach us exactly what we want to know does not show that we cannot imagine bat experience at all (Kind 2019, 167). She supports this by discussing Temple Grandin’s claim that her “visual thinking” allows her, in a limited way, to simulate what cattle see and hear, with practically successful outcomes in livestock handling (Grandin 2006; Kind 2019). Godfrey-Smith (2013) suggests that whereas with humans verbal descriptions can “prompt memories and guide the imagination,” eliciting variations on experiences we already know firsthand, with non-linguistic animals we must instead constrain imagination by drawing on what we know about their behavior, sense organs, and nervous systems, sometimes by mapping alien capacities onto familiar ones (Godfrey-Smith 2013; see also Dawkins 1986). In a similar vein, Yong uses the phrase “an informed imaginative leap” for the step beyond third-person data, when your aim is not only to describe what an animal’s sensory system does but to get some grip on what it might be like to inhabit its perceptual world. You can do the standard explanatory work – study the environment, the animal’s behavior, and the relevant neurophysiological mechanisms – and yet the “ultimate feats of understanding” still require “an informed imaginative leap” (Yong 2022).[1] “Informed” is crucial: the leap is not a freewheeling anthropomorphic projection, but imagination disciplined by empirical constraints (ecology, anatomy, behavior, neurophysiology) and meant to push against the limits of the human Umwelt, which distorts how we think about other creatures. Imagination, for Yong, is thus a methodological tool for pressing against our own cognitive boundaries – and it seems to be so for many of the sensory biologists he is in conversation with throughout the book.

All this suggests that experts on animal minds take imagination to be central to understanding other minds. It also indicates something about what enables – and limits – this imaginative activity. But it still does not tell us what kind of activity is at issue. I cannot give a full account here (that’s the bigger project I am working on), but here is a first approximation. When we try to grasp another species’ mind, we usually run two kinds of imaginative work in parallel, both constrained by what we know about the animal’s body, brain, behavior, and ecology. On one track, we build an “outside” picture: we form careful claims about what the animal can detect, discriminate, and represent (mainly propositional imagination). For bats, for example, we might say that echolocation gives them a structured sense of “echoic space,” allowing fine-grained spatial discrimination. On the other track, we sometimes attempt an “inside” picture: we try, as best we can, to approximate what it might feel like to inhabit that perspective, without simply projecting human psychology onto the animal (mainly recreative, imagistic imagination). With bats, that might involve trying to imagine echolocation less as “hearing turned up” and more as a way of perceiving space that plays a role similar to vision (Dawkins 1986). When there is no close human analogue, the outside route does most of the work and the inside route can only be metaphorical at best, as the bat’s case suggests. But when that inside approximation seems feasible, it can help discipline and enrich the outside claims. For example, dogs’ color vision seems more tractable than bat sonar: they are dichromats, so the red–green distinctions that structure so much of our visual world largely collapse for them. If you try to imagine a bright red toy on a green lawn, the toy may not “pop” in the way it does for us; the scene looks more like a range of yellows, blues, and grays. That kind of controlled “inside” exercise can then feed back into the “outside” claims about what dogs can and cannot visually discriminate in everyday contexts. Crucially, both tracks are forms of an overall striving imaginative endeavor: they proceed through repeated, revisable attempts to get closer, corrected and refined in light of evidence, rather than by a single leap to a final picture.

There is Value and Glory in the Striving

Like Yong, I think there is value in striving to imagine other animals’ minds. There is epistemic value because, e.g., it can help us push past our own Umwelt recalibrating what we take to be salient in animal behavior and making us better at noticing what their perceptual and cognitive capacities actually allow them to feel and do. There is moral value because, e.g., it can make their peculiar kinds of mindedness harder to ignore, widening the scope of our concern beyond the human case. But, as weird as it might sound, I also believe there is aesthetic value. Here is why.

First, imagination can be a disciplined, heuristically significant ingredient of scientific inquiry, and in that setting the aesthetic reward can be understood as part of the satisfaction of inquiry itself – along broadly Kantian lines, as a constrained “free play” of imagination and understanding in the pursuit of knowledge (Breitenbach 2013). This applies not only to scientists who model animal perception, but also to non-specialists who, through well-informed popular accounts such as Yong’s (2022), retrace some of that imaginative labor.

Second, aesthetic gratification can lie in the striving to imagine as such. When we try to imagine what it is like to experience the world through, say, a sonar-like perceptual system, we can enjoy the struggle of approximation rather than the attainment of a final, correct result – something that likely remains beyond our reach. The exercise captivates because we repeatedly aim to get closer, while our imaginings remain constrained by background knowledge about the animal’s behavior and functions. The pleasure here is, in large part, a pleasure in the exercise of imagination (Feagin 1984) and in the striving endeavor as such – structurally akin to what Nguyen calls “striving play,” developed from Suits’s account of games, where the point is not simply the goal but the struggle of striving toward it (Suits 1978; Nguyen 2020).

Third, aesthetic pleasure can also come from the methods we use to scaffold this striving. In practice, our imaginings are often supported by props – artifacts such as books, films, VR, and soundscapes – that guide and constrain imaginative work. Some supports mainly add information, while others work by altering perception itself and giving imagination new materials – for example, movies, VR, bioacoustics. These methods still fall short – our brains remain human – but they can be aesthetically striking precisely because they foreground the interplay between perception and imagination (Walton 1990), an enjoyable blend that can later enrich further attempts to imagine other minds.

And, last but not least, part of the aesthetic pull lies in the minds themselves that we are trying to reach through imagination and in the effects this encounter can produce: for example, a sense of the weirdness – and even eeriness – of forms of mindedness so unlike our own, or a kind of sublime response to the sheer peculiarity and otherness of other minds.

An Immense World is full of these kinds of beauty. Maybe that’s why Yong’s book struck me so strongly, after all.

Notes

[1] Yong takes the phrase “informed imaginative leap” from Alexandra Horowitz—a cognitive scientist who studies canine cognition—and specifically from her book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. It’s another book I warmly recommend.

References

Breitenbach, Angela. 2013. “Beauty in Proofs: Kant on Aesthetics in Mathematics.” European Journal of Philosophy 21 (4): 955–977.

Dawkins, Richard. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Feagin, Susan L. 1984. “Some Pleasures of Imagination.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1): 41-55.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2013. “On Being an Octopus.” Boston Review. URL = https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/peter-godfrey-smith-being-octopus/.

Grandin, Temple. 2006. Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books.

Horowitz, Alexandra. 2009. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. New York: Scribner.

Kind, Amy. 2019. “Mary’s Power of Imagination.” In The Knowledge Argument, edited by Sam Coleman, 161–179. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450.

Nguyen, C. Thi. 2020. Games: Agency as Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Suits, Bernard. 1978. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Yong, Ed. 2022. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. New York: Random House.

A post by Zach Kohler

There is something strange about the experience of theatrical magic. Anyone who has watched a good magic trick knows the feeling—it presents itself without fanfare, yet leaves us with the troubled sense that something about the world we take for granted has briefly been unsettled. This post asks what kind of imaginative engagement makes such an experience possible. Against accounts that assimilate magic either to fictional make-believe or to the presentation of known impossibilities, I contend that theatrical magic ought to operate on what I call the cusp of impossibility: a liminal modal space in which events are experienced as radically implausible without being decisively foreclosed as impossible. My claim is that while magic may, and often does, present itself as outright impossible, its most compelling and aesthetically successful instances do not. Drawing on Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe, Jason Leddington’s alief-based account of illusion, and Richard Moran’s distinction between hypothetical and dramatic imagination, I argue that imagination plays an essential role in magic—not by transporting spectators into a fictional world, but by enabling a resisted, emotionally charged way of relating to our own.

The debate centers around Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe. In Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), Walton explains many art forms in terms of games of make-believe, in which real objects function as “props” that generate fictional truths. In theatre, for example, a wooden stage may count as a ship at sea within the fiction. Some have suggested that magic can be understood along similar lines. Spectators imaginatively participate in scenarios where physical laws are bent or suspended, and ordinary objects such as cards or coins serve as props within a fictional world. Yet this division between fictional worlds and real representations falters in the case of magic, since a magic performance uses real, perceptually present objects, not fictional stand-ins.

This difficulty becomes sharper when we consider Walton’s account of emotional response. How can spectators feel genuine emotions toward situations they know to be fictional? Walton’s answer is that such emotions are quasi-emotions—participants in the game of make-believe pretend to be afraid or astonished. Though, magic resists this explanation too, since the audience is not asked to pretend that a dagger is sharp, they must know that it really is, as when a magician cuts fruit with it before impaling the box where an assistant lies. The emotional stakes of magic depend on this realism. Walton’s framework thus captures something important about imagination, but relocates magic too quickly into fiction, precisely where its distinctive tension dissolves.

Professor of philosophy at Bucknell University, Jason Leddington, offers a cogent alternative. Arguing that magic is not fiction, but illusion, Leddington claims that a successful magic performance presents an impossible event as impossible, directly to the spectator. As he puts it, “the spectator should not be called on to imagine that the impossible is happening, because it should already appear so.” (Leddington, 2016, emphasis in original) Imagination, on this view, is superfluous—yea, counterproductive—since fiction requires world-building elsewhere, whereas magic presents itself here and now. The central problem, then, is how such an experience is psychologically possible. How can spectators respond to something they recognize as impossible without endorsing contradictory beliefs?

Leddington’s solution appeals to Tamar Szabó Gendler’s notion of alief. Unlike belief, alief involves the presence of a representational content in the subject’s cognitive system without endorsement. Aliefs are automatic, arational, and affect-laden, and they can conflict with a subject’s standing beliefs without generating irrationality. In the case of magic, the spectator retains the belief that the event cannot really be happening, while simultaneously alieving that it is. For Leddington, this “belief-discordant alief” explains the immediacy and force of magical experience while avoiding appeals to suspension of disbelief or fictional make-believe.

Leddington further insists that alief must be sharply distinguished from imagination. We can imagine at will, and imagining that not-p while believing that p involves no cognitive conflict. One may imagine flying unaided while fully believing it to be impossible, without any pressure on one’s cognitive system. Alief, by contrast, is involuntary and norm-governed. Believing p while alieving not-p places pressure on the subject because the alief is affectively and behaviorally charged. One may, for instance, retain the belief that humans cannot fly, yet feel ill at ease when witnessing an apparent levitation. It is this belief-discordant tension, Leddington argues, that magic exploits—not merely to generate cognitive dissonance, but to maximize it. (Leddington, 2016)

While Leddingont’s account is compelling, it rests on a restrictive conception of imagination—one that too readily identifies imagination with make-believe. Imagination, however, is not tied in any definite way to fiction-making. We routinely imagine aspects of the actual world, including future events, emotional realities, and even highly abstract features of our physical universe, such as curved spacetime or quantum superposition. Moreover, imagination is not monolithic. Philosopher Richard Moran (2017) distinguishes between hypothetical and dramatic imagination. Hypothetical imagination involves impersonal reasoning about what would follow if some proposition were true. Dramatic imagination, by contrast, involves inhabiting a point of view through affective rehearsal and emotional attunement.

Imagination with respect to emotional attitudes, Moran argues, requires more than propositional supposition. In such cases, what is imagined is not merely the truth of a proposition, but a total perspective on a situation. This form of imagination is norm-governed and resistant; although, resistance here is not a rejection of a proposition, but a refusal or struggle to inhabit a point of view. Applied to magic, Moran’s account shows that the spectator’s imaginative engagement is not a matter of entertaining the proposition that an impossible event has occurred, nor of “feigning belief.” Rather, the spectator is drawn—often involuntarily—into a perspective in which the event is experientially real, even as they resist fully integrating it into their understanding of the world. The tension that sustains magical wonder thus arises not from belief-discordant alief alone, but from the spectator’s struggle to inhabit, without collapse, a perspective that places familiar reality into question. Imagination here is not a vehicle for fiction-making, but a way of relating to the actual world through a resisted, emotionally charged perspective.

It may be tempting to say that alief already does all the work attributed here to dramatic imagination, since both involve non-propositional, affectively charged, world-directed states; but this conflation obscures an important experiential difference. Alief generates resistance to belief—a conflict between representational systems—but it does not account for resistance within experience itself. In other words, alief accounts for the onset of magical experience (automatic belief-discordant response), but not the persistence of the experience. Dramatic imagination, by contrast, names the spectator’s ongoing attempt to inhabit a way of seeing that is experientially compelling, yet resistant to full cognitive integration. This distinction explains why good magic does not merely provoke dissonance but invites continued engagement by allowing uncertainty to be maintained rather than resolved or rejected.

This clarifies a further limitation in Leddington’s account. He claims that the object of magical experience is something “impossible and known to be so.” (Leddington, 2016)  This overstates the role of settled impossibility in the phenomenology of magic. While spectators typically retain a standing belief that what they have witnessed cannot be explained by ordinary means, the experience itself rarely presents as a confrontation with brute logical contradiction. Even granting belief-discordant alief, the modal character of the experience remains more indeterminate than Leddington allows. While magic may—and often does—force the spectator into contact with events experienced as decisively impossible, this is not where magic is at its aesthetic best. Instead, great magic sustains engagement by holding possibility open just long enough to resist closure. I call this the cusp of impossibility.

The cusp is a liminal modal space in which an event is experienced as radically implausible without being conclusively foreclosed. When impossibility is fully settled, the experience collapses into dismissal or abstraction. By contrast, magical effects often exploit domains of partial ignorance or conceptual openness, where background beliefs remain intact but insufficient to stabilize the experience. The result is not endorsement of impossibility, but a lived uncertainty in which the spectator registers the anomalous event without resolving its modal status. The goal of good magic, on this view, is not to maximize cognitive dissonance, but to maintain a delicate balance that leaves the spectator teetering between the possible and the impossible.

Recognizing magic as operating on the cusp of impossibility allows us to treat alief and imagination not as rivals, but as complementary components of the experience of magic. Leddington is right that magic induces an automatic, affectively charged state in which an anomalous event is represented without belief-endorsement, and alief plausibly accounts for the immediacy and force of this initial engagement. What alief alone cannot explain, however, is the persistence and resistance characteristic of magical wonder. Here Moran’s notion of dramatic imagination becomes indispensable as it sustains the spectator’s relation to the event by holding open a resisted point of view. The spectator imaginatively inhabits a stance in which the event is experientially real while remaining resistant to full cognitive integration. Alief anchors the experience perceptually and affectively, while dramatic imagination shapes and prolongs it by negotiating its unresolved modal status. Together, they explain how magic achieves its distinctive aesthetic power—one that depends not on the maximization of cognitive dissonance, but on its careful modulation.

References

Leddington, J. (2016). The Experience of Magic. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 74(3), 253–264. https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12290

Moran, R. (2017). The philosophical imagination : selected essays. Oxford University Press.

Walton, K. L. (1990). Mimesis as make-believe : on the foundations of the representational arts. Harvard Univ. Press.

A post by Kerry Clark

Introduction

Imagination is used in many ways—whether in daydreaming, anticipating future outcomes, or engaging in creative works. I take imagination to be (roughly) the mental faculty that allows individuals to form images, ideas, and sensations without direct input from the senses. This mental faculty supports important human activities, whether it be for practical purposes like imagining how to organize furniture, daydreaming for entertainment purposes, or imagining to better understand the world around us. This post explores imagination within two distinct but related processes: learning and creativity.

A helpful way to clarify imagination’s separate roles is to distinguish two uses: transcendent and instructive (Kind and Kung, 2016). First, the transcendent use of imagination involves imagining significant departures to the world as it is, for example, a world with different laws of nature. Transcendent imagination can contribute to the creative process because an individual may exaggerate or distort reality to develop a novel idea. Second, imagination can be instructive in the sense that one constrains imagination to reality, for example, by constraining imagination to the current laws of nature. This use of imagination can help one learn about the world around them. While both uses of imagination are valuable, their effectiveness depends on context. Since learning is generally aimed at accurate knowledge or practical action, instructive imagination typically supports learning better than transcendent imagination. By contrast, creativity is typically aimed at producing something novel and valuable, and therefore, transcendent imagination tends to support creative thinking better than instructive imagination.

Imagination in the Learning Process

The purpose of learning is to acquire knowledge, understanding, or to develop a skill. Since imagination does not require direct input from the senses, it can facilitate learning by allowing one to mentally represent phenomena and possibilities that are not directly observable. For example:

• Imagination helps when one mentally rehearses information, like visualizing states to remember capitals.

• Imagination helps when picturing the various phases of cell division to better understand biological processes.

• Imagination helps a dancer practice a new routine by visualizing the movements.

These examples illustrate how imagination effectively helps the agent learn something without direct contact with the phenomena. It seems that imagination can also help organize and support one’s memory.

 Imagination seems to be most helpful for learning when it tracks reality. Consider evaporation, the phase of the water cycle when liquid water turns into water vapor. A student does not need to directly observe evaporation to understand it; she can use instructive imagination to visualize liquid water becoming gas, thereby reinforcing her grasp of the process.

However, imagination may stray from reality (transcendent imagination) and hinder learning. If a student imagines water flowing up into the sky turning into clumps of glitter and exploding into ashes, the mental image no longer corresponds with the phenomena being learned. Because imagination can depart from reality, it may lead to a misunderstanding that prevents the student from acquiring knowledge that constitutes learning.

This raises an important qualification: there are cases in which transcendent imagination appears to facilitate learning, but typically this works only insofar as the imaginative project contains some element of truth. For instance, a child interacting with a fantastical imaginary friend may learn how humans work (bodily and socially), even though the friend is invented. The child may develop social skills or learn the value of friendship with others, but this only works if the imagination is tracking some truth about how humans operate. Learning occurs not because the fantasy is accurate, but because the child’s imaginative project still reflects real features of social interaction.

Imagination is not sufficient for a person to acquire knowledge or understanding because there needs to be some form of evidence, justification, or some reality-based constraint that imagination cannot provide. As a result, imagination can only play an enabling role for learning factual knowledge. Jonathan Egeland (2024) makes a similar point that imagination cannot generate new knowledge and Shannon Spaulding (2016) contends that imagination whether it is spontaneous or deliberate cannot provide knowledge of contingent facts. While it is true that imagination alone cannot generate new factual knowledge, imagination may support learning in other ways. Imagination can support learning by providing a mental place where an agent can explore or practice their skills. For instance, a writer imagining possible plots, or a scientist gaining understanding by imagining a concrete example of a general natural phenomenon. In these cases, imagination is most effective when it is instructive because it can guide accurate understanding, or other aims of learning.

However, if imagination is a skill like some philosophers claim (Kind 2020, Blomkvist 2022), then not just the instructive use, but also the transcendent use can contribute to developing the skill of imagination. While the transcendent use can contribute to strengthening this skill, as Paul Hager (2005) notes, successful learning (of any kind) should enable an agent to act effectively in the world. Therefore, the instructive use of imagination is typically more effective for learning overall.

Imagination in the Creative Process

Unlike learning, creativity requires novelty. Most accounts of creativity posit novelty and value (of some kind) as necessary conditions (Runco 2012). Thus, it is widely held that creativity aims to produce something new and valuable. In the creative process, imagination likely helps generate novel ideas because the freedom of imagination allows agents to visualize possibilities unconstrained by reality. For instance, it seems that transcendent imagination would play a direct role in the aspiring writer. A writer’s imagination may facilitate the development of the story, picturing different characters, and internally acting out dialogue. The newness imagination brings is the ability to create unfamiliar places, people, and narratives. These new aspects satisfy the novelty condition which is necessary for the creative process. In this way, transcendent imagination clearly supports the development of new ideas, which is essential for creativity.

Even the instructive use of imagination can lead to creativity. For example, a writer gets inspiration for a historical fiction novel, while imagining historical events. The writer constrains her imagination to a particular event, then blends that factual event with a realistic narrative. The result is a creative novel developed from imagining an authentic setting and dialogue based on history. In this case, instructive imagination can be the spark that leads to a new idea.

Rigidly constraining imagination to reality, however, may hinder creativity by preventing the possibility of visualizing new ideas. Imagination facilitates creativity because of its mental playfulness. Since novelty is an essential feature of creativity, imagination’s usefulness is primarily when it departs from reality. Even in the historical fiction case, creativity occurs because there is novelty present in the fictional narrative. Thus, there needs to be some sense of newness or freedom for creativity. As a result, imagination when used to track reality does not as easily lead to a creative idea, as this ability may hinder the aims of creativity. Instead, creativity typically thrives in breaking away from tradition and reality.

The Interaction Between Creativity and Learning

Have I oversimplified imagination? Within this post I separated the learning and creative processes, but the likely truth is that the two are deeply connected. There is disagreement in the creativity literature about the connection between learning and creativity. Maria Kronfeldner (2018) argues that originality is a core feature of creativity and contrasts it with learning. Kronfeldner clarifies that this is not a direct opposition, yet there are methods of learning that prevent creativity, like rote copying. Thus, these methods of learning can stifle creativity. However, Lindsay Brainard (2024) compares creativity to learning and exploring, which supports the claim that the two are not directly opposed. Brainard uses this analogy to support her view that creativity involves epistemic value, this suggests that creativity may be tightly connected to the learning process.

Just as imagination is not a strict dichotomy between instructive or transcendent use, creativity and learning are not polar opposites either. While both are distinct processes, they involve each other in a variety of ways. Learning may be partly creative, or the creative process may include learning. Often both learning and creativity happen together whether we are aware or not. For instance:

(A) A poet might learn something about herself while writing a whimsical poem.

(B) A student might develop a creative story while learning about honeybees.

These examples highlight the complexity of both processes and how they may operate amongst each other, not always in opposition. Imagination can spark creativity, and sometimes conflict with truth-directed learning. Focusing on the different aims of learning and creativity clarifies when each use of imagination is appropriate. Thus, developing the skill of imagination is beneficial for both learning and creativity.

References

Blomkvist, Andrea. 2022. "Imagination As a Skill: A Bayesian Proposal." Synthese 1-23.

Brainard, Lindsay. 2024. "What is Creativity?" The Philosophical Quarterly 1-23.

Egeland, Jonathan. 2024. "Imagination Cannot Generate Empirical Justification or Knowledge." Erkenntnis 2951-2970.

Hager, Paul. 2005. "Philosophical Accounts of Learning." Educational Philosophy and Theory 649-666.

Kind, Amy. 2022. Imagination and Creative Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—. "The Skill of Imagination." In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise, edited by Ellen Fridland and Carlotta Pavese, 335-346. New York: Routledge.

Kind, Amy, and Peter Kung. 2016. "Introduction: The Puzzle of Imaginative Use." In Knowledge Through Imagination, by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 1-37. Oxford : Oxford University Press.

Kronfeldner, Maria. 2018. "Explaining Creativity." In Creativity and Philosophy, by Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran, 213-229. London: Routledge.

Runco, Mark A., and Garrett J. Jaeger. 2012. "The Standard Definition of Creativity." Creativity Research Journal 92-96.

Spaulding, Shannon. 2016. "Imagination Through Knowledge." In Knowledge Through Imagination, by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 207-226. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A post by Avshalom Schwartz 

The safest general characterization of the history of imagination is that it begins with Plato. Indeed, this is a rare point of agreement between scholars—from intellectual historians to analytical philosophers—about what is otherwise a contested and heavily debated concept. According to this standard account, Plato was the first to offer a philosophical investigation of imagination. This position was taken, for example, by Murray Wright Bundy in what is, to this day, the most comprehensive study of imagination in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Bundy’s claim that “the history of ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ as terms of reflective thought begins with Plato” is echoed in countless other historical and philosophical treatments of this concept (Bundy 1927, 11; cf. Kearney 1988, 87; Jørgensen 2017; Watson 1988, 1; Clifford and Buxton 2023, 4). Aristotle, as this common story goes, was the first to treat this concept systematically—“the first to give a careful delineation of the power of imagination as part of a complex theory of human and animal psychology,” as one commentator has put it (Sepper 2013; See also Schweitzer 1925, 77)—with others going as far as attributing to him the “discovery” of imagination (Castoriadis 1997).

Very few studies of the imagination have examined the pre-Platonic imagination or evaluated the background of his treatment of imagination and the resources on which he drew in developing his philosophical account of this mental faculty. Some have searched among Plato’s philosophical predecessors, focusing on pre-Socratic thinkers such as Thales, the Atomists, Heraclitus, and Parmenides (Ambrosi 1898, 5–9; Bundy 1927, 11–18; Sepper 2013, 107–14). Others took more mythical or aesthetic routes, treating the story of Prometheus and early practice of poetry—including ideas about inspiration and creativity—as pre-theoretical reflections on the human imaginative power (Kearney 1988, 79–80; Jørgensen 2017, 21; Sheppard 2015). But what about the more straightforward, linguistic origins of imagination?

Among classical scholars, it is well known and recognized that the ancient Greek term for imagination, phantasia, is derived from the noun phantasma (“appearance, image, ghost”), itself a secondary derivation from the verb phantazomai (“to make visible, to represent”). This group of phant- root words, in turn, is derived from the general verb phainō (“become visible, come into the light, show oneself, appear”), which can be traced back to phae, phaos, phōs, words that generally refer to “light” (Chantraine et al. 1999, 1168, 1170–71; Beekes 2009, 1545–46; Bundy 1927, 12). Eikasia, the second—and somewhat less central—ancient Greek term for imagination, has a parallel history. It is derived from eikō (“to be/seem like”), which is the root of later verbs such as eoika (“to resemble, to seem”) and eikazō (“represent by an image”) and the noun eikon (“image, representation”) (Chantraine et al. 1999, 354–55; Beekes 2009, 380–81; cf. Bundy 1927, 11–12). Although familiar to many scholars of imagination, the implications of this etymology for our understanding of the concept, its historical roots, and its developments have yet to be explored. This has left us with only a partial understanding of the origins of imagination, the reason behind its appearance in the middle dialogues of Plato, and the shape that it took in his writings and in the work of his successors.

Taking such a philological route to the study of the origins of imagination yields surprising insights. In sharp contrast to the contemporary emphasis on imagination’s role in producing mental images and representations, the words that form the linguistic backdrop for the later development of imagination often describe how things in the world appear to the human observer and the profound epistemological uncertainty surrounding some of these appearances. A modern reader might be even more surprised by the context in which these words are found. In both epic and tragic poetry—the two earliest literary sources to make use of this vocabulary of the “proto-imagination”—these words are used to describe encounters between humans and gods, the various forms the gods take when appearing to humans, and the radical epistemic uncertainty involved in these moments.

Let me briefly consider a few examples. In Book I of Homer’s Iliad, Athena appears to Achilles and intervenes moments before he draws his sword and strikes Agamemnon. “She stood behind him, and seized the son of Peleus by his fair hair, appearing (phainomenē) to him alone. No one of the others saw her” (1.195-200). The word used to describe Athena’s appearance, phainomenē, is a participle form of the verb phainō (“to appear”), which, as noted above, is the linguistic predecessor of phantasia. The Homeric poem also frequently employs variations of the verb eikō (“be like, resemble”), which is the basis of the second Greek term for imagination, eikasia. This is the case, for example, when Zeus sends a Dream to Agamemnon, which appears in the likeness (eoikōs) of Nestor (2.20-23). Greek tragedy echoes the Homeric use of this vocabulary and further expands on it. In Euripides’s Bacchae, for example, Dionysus appears (phanenta, e.g., 39-54), disguised, to the people of Thebes, and in one memorable scene creates a “phantom” (phasma) of himself out of thin air, which the young prince Pentheus desperately tries to stab with his sword. The same word is used by Euripides again in Iphigenia in Aulis to describe the marvelous scene in which, moments before being sacrificed, Iphigenia is replaced with a large deer on the altar, “due to some phantom (phasma) from the gods” (1584-6).  

These are only a few examples (there are plenty more where they came from!). But they can nonetheless provide us with some insights about the original questions, problems, and phenomena that gave rise to the discovery of imagination in classical antiquity. First, as noted above, it suggests that the original conception of the imagination arose from concern not with mental images or representations, but rather with how the world appears to the human observer. Second, it points to the profound epistemic uncertainty involved in some of these appearances. In short, the fact that the gods often appear in disguise—and take the likeness of other humans—puts humans in an awkward position of epistemic uncertainty, where they are constantly struggling to determine whether the person standing next to them, talking to them, or fighting alongside them is a human or an Olympian in disguise. It thus points to an ever-present potential gap between the world as it is and the world as it appears to the human observer, thus suggesting that this “proto-vocabulary” of imagination might be linked to one of the most difficult problems that later generations of philosophers have come to associate with the imagination.

Finally, taking such a philological route to the earliest history of imagination provides us with a promising new approach to studying the discovery of this mental faculty in Plato’s work. As classical philosophers know well, Plato was not writing in a vacuum. Even when he introduces novel concepts and radical ideas, he borrows from the philosophical, poetic, and political vocabulary that was available to him and his contemporaries, often making highly sophisticated and subtle interventions. Perhaps the best-known example of this is his use of the word theoria (“theory”) to describe the practice of philosophy. Borrowed from an ancient institution of religious pilgrimage, in which a theoros was sent to other city-states to behold religious festivals and cult practices, this term was appropriated by Plato to describe the philosopher’s intellectual pilgrimage to behold eternal truths about the kosmos, before descending back into the cave armed with his newly acquired knowledge (Nightingale 2004). Tracing the earliest linguistic sources for the words Plato has chosen to describe the newly discovered mental faculty of “imagination” has the potential for yielding equally surprising insights. Uncovering the terms, concepts, debates, and concerns he was responding to when introducing this concept can thus provide us with a new perspective not only on Plato’s “theory” of imagination—a notoriously difficult aspect of his metaphysics and epistemology and a source for endless scholarly debate—but also on the history of imagination and our contemporary treatment of this concept in philosophy.

References

Ambrosi, Luigi. 1898. La psicologia della immaginazione nella storia della filosofia. Società editrice Dante Alighieri.

Beekes, Robert. 2009. Etymological Dictionary of Greek (2 Vols.). Brill.

Bundy, Murray Wright. 1927. “The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought.” University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 7: 2–3.

Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. “The Discovery of the Imagination.” In World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, edited and translated by D. A. Curtis. Stanford University Press.

Chantraine, Pierre, Alain Blanc, Charles de Lamberterie, and Jean-Louis Perpillou. 1999. Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque: Histoire des mots. 1st edition. Klincksieck.

Clifford, Emily, and Xavier Buxton. 2023. “Introduction.” In The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens. Routledge.

Jørgensen, Dorthe. 2017. “The Philosophy of Imagination.” In Handbook of Imagination and Culture, edited by Tania Zittoun and Vlad Glaveanu. Oxford University Press.

Kearney, Richard. 1988. The Wake of the Imagination. Routledge.

Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. 2004. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context. Cambridge University Press.

Schweitzer, Bernhard. 1925. “Der Bildende Künstler Und Der Begriff Des Künstlerischen in Der Antike: ΜΙΜΗΣΙΣ Und ΦΑΝΤΑΣΙΑ.” Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher.

Sepper, Dennis L. 2013. Understanding Imagination: The Reason of Images. Springer.

Sheppard, Anne. 2015. “Imagination.” In A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, 1st ed., edited by Pierre Destrée and Penelope Murray. Wiley.

Watson, Gerard. 1988. Phantasia in Classical Thought. Galway University Press.

A post by Neil Van Leeuwen

In the background as I write this blog, the Superbowl is on. The Seahawks currently lead 6-0 in the second quarter, which makes me vaguely happy, since I dislike the Patriots (sorry, not sorry). But I’m not Seahawks fan, so my investment in the game is minimal enough that I can write.

Things are different, of course, for New England and Seattle fans. For them, this game will appear as one of the most riveting things they’ve seen in years. And all told, about 100 million people in the United States, along with about 25 million more around the world, are watching this game.

Of course, the Superbowl and sports in general aren’t the only long viewing people do. Estimates suggest that that average person watches about a movie a week, and then TV shows are in addition to that. Most movies and TV shows are fictional dramas, and plays and musicals fall in that category as well. So the amount of fictional drama that people watch is impressive as well.

Given all that, if you were to ask, “What do people like watching more, sports or fictional drama?” I would have a genuinely hard time answering. We could come at the question from multiple different angles, some of which might put sports on top and others of which might put fictional drama on top.

But there is a related question, concerning which I think the answer is abundantly clear: What do people like rewatching more, sports or fictions?

My impression is that few people—even New England and Seattle fans—will rewatch the whole Superbowl, though rewatching highlights is fairly common. But people certainly rewatch movies that they like in their entirety, with one source saying that the average American believes they’ve watched their favorite movie 38 (!) times. I frankly suspect that number is high, but to have watched one’s favorite movie a dozen times is easily a common thing. And people don’t just rewatch their top favorite; I have about 10 movies I periodically rewatch, and I doubt that’s uncommon.

So here’s the puzzle: given that initially viewing sports and initially viewing fiction are comparably likable [update: Seattle is now up 9-0!], why is it that the likability of rewatching is so different, with fiction dramatically (pun intended) outperforming sports?

We can heighten this puzzle in various ways. Note that many of the same things are supposed to constitute the enjoyability of watching either sports or fiction. There is conflict. There is suspense. There are characters and emotions. There are reversals, and thus both give us some kind of story. Both are, much of the time, visually impressive. So why does the enjoyability of all that get exhausted on first viewing in the sports case but not in the fiction case.

You might say that in the sports case, not knowing what happens in the end is what makes it interesting. But that just shifts the question without really answering the initial version of it. Why does knowing what happens in the end sap the enjoyability from a sports game in a way that it doesn’t for fictions? Of course, people often prefer not to know what happens in a fiction—“no spoilers!”—but the existence of such a preference is consistent with the claim that there’s a massive difference between (i) what knowing the end of a sports game does and (ii) knowing what the end of a movie, for example, does. Why is knowing a killjoy in one case but not the other?

I unfortunately don’t have a solution to this puzzle. But I am fairly confident that the central difference has something to do with how suspense works in fictional dramas versus sports. In a sports game, the suspense consists in the fact that, from the perspective of the viewer, each next play could be one that changes the course of the game: a homerun, a goal, a touchdown, a breakaway. It is not knowing whether the play will be game changing that keeps the game continually suspenseful—or continually suspenseful the first time. One is constantly hoping something will happen, and this makes it engaging. When I rewatch sports, that hope just isn’t there; it doesn’t feel like hoping for anything makes sense when the game has already happened.

But no matter how many times I watch a movie I love—even though I know how things will go—I still feel myself hoping certain things will happen or not happen. I hope that Miles won’t sabotage his budding relationship with Maya as if I didn’t know whether he will or won’t (even though I actually do know he does in the very next scene). I find myself hoping—every time I watch Star Wars—that Obi Wan will best Vader (even though we all know what happens…). So it seems that the tendency to hope for outcomes as if one doesn’t know is what keeps fictions engaging over and over again; it’s what keeps them suspenseful.

Thus, something about entering the frame of not-knowing-despite-knowing is what keeps movies engaging on rewatching [Seahawks are now up 19-7 in the fourth quarter] in ways that sports isn’t. But that just shifts the problem as well! For why is it that one can’t adopt the frame of not-knowing-despite-knowing in the sports case and thereby have an equally fun experience, or at least still a really engaging experience? It is as if one can’t adopt that frame in the sports case, but one just does without even trying in the fiction case. But why can’t one in the sports case? And why does one almost invariably do so on rewatching in the fiction case? I have to confess I have no answer—I just know it’s a good problem.

For completeness, I should mention one proposal from my friend Claudia, who happened to be walking through the lounge of our building where I’m watching and writing. Claudia is a psychotherapist, so I figured she would find the puzzle interesting and might have something to say. Her view is that the type of emotions that fictions elicit is deeper than the type of emotions that sports elicit. Sports emotions, on her view, are comprised more of moment to moment “euphoria” than of deeper feelings. I confess that something sounds right about that, and it may go some way to explaining why people rewatch in one case but not the other. Nevertheless, I think there’s a lot about this difference I’m talking about that still remains to be explained, even if she’s right. In particular, the differential suspense is still puzzling. Why does knowing the outcome kill it in one case but not the other? Even if sports only does give moment-to-moment euphoria, why can’t it do so a second time?

I’m looking forward to seeing proposed solutions in the comments! At this point, there are 39 seconds left in the game, and this is a blog I was supposed to submit three days ago. So: Congratulations to the Seahawks, who are sure to win. As for me, it’s time for me to go upstairs, pour a glass of bourbon, and start on my 38th iteration of 10 Things I Hate About You.

A post by Hannah Fasnacht

«Wie geht’s?» fragte die Trauer die Hoffnung.

«Ich bin etwas traurig», sagte die Hoffnung.

«Hoffentlich», sagte die Trauer.

—Franz Hohler

“How are you?” Sadness asked Hope.

“I’m a little sad”, Hope said.

“I would hope so”, said Sadness.

[my translation]

Grief is typically directed at or caused by an actual loss: the death of a person, the end of a relationship, the removal of a certain form of security, for example due to a war, the deprivation of abilities and things once possessed. One could call this kind of grief “past-oriented” and “directed at actual objects”. Mostly, grief is understood as a reaction to a loss – paradigmatically, the loss of someone close to us (Cholbi 2021; Ratcliffe 2020).

Grief seems to be a complex thing. It is not just sadness; rather, it is arguably a process with different emotions which can co-exist, contradict each other, shift into one another, have “stages” (Kübler-Ross 1969) or come in waves. Grief is not neat and contained, but can be raw and unfiltered:

It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.

—Toni Morrison, “Sula”

There might be a mixture of acceptance and raw hurt:

Sometimes, when I think about it, I still feel a dark hurt from some primal part of myself, and if I’m alone in my apartment when this happens I will hear myself making sounds that I never made before I went to Mongolia. I realize that I have turned back into a wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone. Most of the time it seems sort of O.K., though, natural. Nature. Mother Nature. She is free to do whatever she chooses.

—Ariel Levy, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia”

What seems central to grief is a form of finality or a contestation or confrontation with exactly this finality.

… it is an act of resistance and refusal, grief telling you that it is over and your heart saying that it is not …

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Notes on Grief”

Recently, the notion of grief has been expanded to include the phenomenon of anticipatory grief  (Allard et al. 2020; Evans 1994)—e.g. grief in light of a relative’s terminal illness or dementia. We anticipatorily grieve what we know is inevitable, what will come to pass.

I am here interested in yet another phenomenon: grieving the impossible, a form of grief that is directed not at an actual person or object or something in the past, but rather at an imagined (im-)possible future that will never come to be. Michael Cholbi argues that grief is not only directed at those who play an important role in our daily lives, but can also be aspirational and “… directed at those who play key roles in how we see ourselves and our lives, those in whom we have invested our hopes and in whom we thereby invested our practical identities.” (Cholbi 2021, 36)

I think this is possible also for people and things which never even existed, where the imagined object never was and never will be. We can not only grieve the loss of people close to us, relationships, experiences, things that were real. We can also grieve things we imagined and formed mental imagery about, things that never were, potential futures in which we mentally (and emotionally) invested, craved and longed for. Examples include grieving biological parenthood that is unattainable due to infertility, or grieving certain rights for which one has fought in a political movement but which seem to be permanently repressed. I will call this future-directed grief, one that involves the grieving of possibilities that were never realized.

We can examine how grief can be possible and appropriate when nothing “real” has been lost, when the grief in question is instead directed at something that will never come to be. Is this form of grief as weighty and important as other kinds? In what sense is the phenomenon of grieving the impossible distinct? Does it inform other forms of grief? If we take seriously this notion—namely that we can actually grieve something we imagined and hoped for—then it seems to me that propositional imagination and mental imagery play a constitutive role for this kind of grief.

Some philosophical questions that arise when thinking about grieving an impossible imagined future are similar to those that arise when thinking about the infamous “paradox of fiction” (PoF). Stacie Friend recently gave an excellent overview of the discussion regarding the PoF (Friend 2022). She argues that the dichotomous approach, which examines whether such emotions directed toward fiction are of the same kind as other emotions we experience in our ordinary life, is not helpful.

We could ask whether they are of the same phenomenal intensity, whether they are motivational, whether we experience physiological reactions, and whether evaluative components differ. (Friend 2022, 261; Adair 2019) Instead, Friend proposes to take into account all the variations and gradations the above components can have. This allows us a more nuanced picture, where we do not need to take such emotions to be exactly the same, but also not a totally separate kind.

I think this approach is useful for thinking about a grieving process which is directed at some imagined future, too. We might wonder, what is distinct in such cases, and maybe there are some really illuminating things to be found, but it seems that variations and gradations of the above components can be found in the paradigmatic “past-directed” form of grieving, and the “future-directed” form of grieving as well. The intensity, for example, with which one might be grieving a real person (say, one’s parent) and grieving a person who never existed (say, the wished-for child) is deeply personal and dependent on one’s particular circumstances.

Another thing similar to the PoF is whether we take the grieving about an imagined thing as appropriate. My intuition is that such a future-directed grief can be a real rational form of grief. There are probably distinctions to be made, and the rationality aspect can be disputed in certain examples, but it seems to me that there are at least cases where the grief in question can be apt for the future-directed case as well as the past-directed one.

I want to mention some potential distinctions and characteristics, nevertheless.

First, between PoF and the future-directed grief: We normally spend a limited time engaging with a work of fiction. But grieving an imagined future often follows big personal dreams and hopes and imagined lifepaths in which we invest quite some time imagining how they would be, maybe orienting our lives accordingly so it is more probable that such futures will come to be.

Second, that the thing we grieve was at least in theory possible for oneself is what differentiates that kind of phenomenon from other things that we can imagine and would be extremely happy about if they were to come true, but about which we only shrug if they don’t come to be actualized (e.g. the ability to fly unassisted).

Third, depending on the specific case, we might be taken by shock and surprise (e.g. after a diagnosis) if we expected and never doubted that the imagined object will come to be, or we might gradually anticipate our dream slipping away (e.g. due to time running out and certain things becoming more improbable). And depending on the dream/hope, we might have had more or less agency to pursue and achieve it. But all these aspects also factor in to varying degrees in the paradigmatic past-directed case of grief which is directed at something real.

Fourth, what seems different at first, though, is the interpersonal mourning process. There aren’t always clear rituals, procedures, condolences, burials, and culturally practiced norms that accompany the loss of an imagined future.

And finally, another differentiation is that the object of grief that never was and never will be is constituted through imagination. But even this might not be as clear-cut a distinction. One element we grieve when the people we care about die, seems to be the potential future they would have had and the future we would have had together. So, at the very least, in further thinking about grieving an impossible future, we might learn something about the paradigmatic case of grief, too.

 References

Adair, Heather V. 2019. ‘Updating Thought Theory: Emotion and the Non-Paradox of Fiction’. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (4): 1055–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12294.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2020. “Notes on Grief”. The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/notes-on-grief#rid=6212886d-fc32-47e0-8a70-34ecf4270788&q=adichie)

Allard, Emilie, Christine Genest, and Alain Legault. 2020. ‘Theoretical and Philosophical Assumptions behind the Concept of Anticipatory Grief’. International Journal of Palliative Nursing 26 (2): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.12968/ijpn.2020.26.2.56.

Cholbi, Michael. 2021. ‘Grief: A Philosophical Guide’. Princeton University Press.

Evans, A. J. 1994. ‘Anticipatory Grief: A Theoretical Challenge’. Palliative Medicine 8 (2): 159–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/026921639400800211.

Friend, Stacie. 2022. ‘Emotion in Fiction: State of the Art’. The British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (2): 257–71. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayab060.

Hohler, Franz. Poem: https://www.karldergrosse.ch/programm/veranstaltung/winterreden-2026-franz-hohler

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. 1969. On Death and Dying .

Levy, Ariel. 2013. “Thanksgiving in Mongolia. Adventure and heartbreak at the edge of the world.” The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/18/thanksgiving-in-mongolia)

Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2020. ‘Towards a Phenomenology of Grief: Insights from Merleau-Ponty’. European Journal of Philosophy 28 (3): 657–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12513.