A post by Valerie Bernard

Of course, it is indeed the genuine room that I aim at, just as I aim at the genuine Pierre. But it is given as absent; and at the same time its character is deeply modified since the external relation of contiguity that links it to Pierre is transformed into an internal relation of belonging. 

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, p. 129

It is a peculiar thing to think about what is absent. As I sit in this café, my eyes scan the dark stained maple bookcase, the woman on her phone, the computer in front of me. I try not to hear the awkward conversation at the next table or be distracted by the song playing overhead. I am confronted by these things. They are present, annoyingly, inescapably present. But my eyes are doing something else as I scan this café. My focus shifts in and out, my eyes remain forward but it is as if they are turned around and looking back inside my head. I am thinking about what is absent, about the person I wish was here, but who is not. He is gone. And so I watch the woman on her phone as she jots down notes and I scan the crowd at the counter, but it is as if I am double seeing: I am looking at what is present, but I’m focused on what is absent. My inner eye is not turned toward the present but the past, to what is remembered, to what is imagined.

Edmund Husserl (1931/1977) thought through the way that the intentionality of experience – meaning, minimally, the mind’s directedness towards its objects – goes beyond what is strictly speaking seen or sensorily experienced. By his lights, subjective experience involves an “intentional horizon of reference” that extends beyond what is immediately present to the senses. It involves “potentialities of consciousness” that include what Jonathan Mitchell (2026) calls explicit alongside implicit intentionality. Somehow the mind manages to fill in the gaps so that what is explicitly sensed is complemented by what is implicitly experienced, whether it is the obstructed opposite side of a chair, awareness of what is missing from a scene, or thoughts about what is imagined.

In analytic literature this is referred to as phenomenal or perceptual presence. On Alva Noë’s (2004) account, my perceptual experience of the chair across from me acquires the content of the obstructed backside thanks to my possession of bodily skills. My sensorimotor capacities provide the information to make what is unseen from my vantage point part of my overall perceptual experience of the chair as a three-dimensional object. He calls this an experience of “presence in absence,” arguing that what is occluded is made part of perceptual experience through the active interplay between perceivers and the world.

The question is how what is absent can be part of my intentional experience when I am not moving around trying to see behind the chair. Kant (1781/1998) understands the imagination as playing this role: it is our imaginative faculties that fill in the gaps so that while we may see only three sides of a cube we are implicitly aware that it is a three-dimensional object with three more unseen sides. Amy Kind (2018) draws upon Kant’s theory of the imagination to offer an alternative to Noë, arguing that it is the imagination, not bodily engagement, that furnishes what she calls “imaginative presence.”

But if you focus your attention to your experience of what is imagined – whether it is an occluded side or an object that is not there – you may find that “presence” is an odd word to give to this experience. Try this: imagine that there is a chair in front of you when there is none. When I do this, my eyes move around the imagined contours of the imaginary chair to give me a sense of its dimensions and the space it would occupy. If I squint a bit, I can picture its color and how it would fit into the space. But this activity takes a lot of mental work and as soon as I get bored of doing it, the chair vanishes. It feels painfully clear that there is nothing there. The true defining feature of my imagined chair is its absence, its nonexistence, its nothingness.

Across from my table at this café there is an empty chair. I can see the concave inside of its back rest and, logically, I know there is a backside as well but I cannot see it. Probabilistic thinking and memory tell me that the backside is likely the same as that of all the other chairs I see around me. But what if I play a game with myself and imagine that the back is painted in psychedelic colors and swirls? I can visualize that, but if I examine in myself what my experience is, I find that I am “double seeing” again. I had no problem attaching the backside to the chair when I held it conceptually as an implicit awareness. But once I engage my imagination and try to “see” the psychedelic swirls, my focus on the actual chair blurs while what I visualize is held somewhere in imagined space in a way that allows it to imaginatively face me. What I am visualizing now is not attached to the chair. It is apprehended as a separate thing, an imagined thing, a back-of-the-chair-that-is-not-there thing. I find this even if I now posit that the backside of the chair looks the same as all the rest. Once I try to “see” it in my mind’s eye, it feels separated from the chair somehow.

But the image’s detachment feels abstract when it’s about chairs. It feels visceral and agonizing when it is about Pierre. Here the concept of “imaginative presence” feels like a cruel joke. I can look at the chair across from me and imagine him sitting in it, I can “see” his smile and “hear” his laugh, but there is no way in which that feels like his presence to me. The more I long for his presence in that chair, the more deeply his absence is felt. My mind is transported somewhere else, to moments when he was actually sitting across from me. That is the real Pierre, existing in another time and place. What is before me is an empty chair and no amount of concentrated visualization fixes that. I can use my imagination to make the imagined Pierre happy, angry or sad, but what I cannot do is use my imagination to make him feel present. Even when I dream of him, it doesn’t really feel like true presence. He looks distorted, his actions are strange, it is too fleeting and that dreamed Pierre is somehow not really experienced as external to me. His actions and features are malleable according to my wishes and fears, and I’m not entirely sure that I can truly see his face. It is more subtle, but it is still absence: absence of alterity, of reality, of a true encounter.

This was Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1940/2004) point about the imagination; the imagination deals in absence and that is its fundamental distinction from perception, which deals in presence. Kant describes two levels or kinds of imagination, one a priori and one a posteriori, with the former allowing us to recognize objects as three-dimensional as a condition of experience. This is different from a posteriori sensory imagination, which is what I have been discussing in this post. While it may be that at an a priori level the imagination is filling in the gaps of experience such that I implicitly recognize that the chair across from me has a backside, it is not clear that sensory imagination truly gives me a sense of presence of that backside. I can mentally reach for, so to speak, the backside of the chair with the active use of my imagination, but now I am doing something quite different than perceiving. I’m imagining: I’m effectively guessing at what is there and what it looks like.

The point is that the imagination is giving us something that is unique to it, distinct from perception. The imagination allows us to experience what is absent and make it part of the intentional horizon of reference for a given experience. But in doing so, it is not furnishing a sense of presence. Rather, sensory imagination is enriching experience by allowing us to access intentional objects that are absent and experienced as such. It allows us to do what I above called “double seeing” – we sensorily perceive what is present through perception while also attending to what is absent through the imagination.

References

Husserl, E. (1977). Cartesian Meditations (J. S. Churchill, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff. (Original work published 1931)

Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1781)

Kind, A. (2018). Imaginative Presence. In Phenomenal Presence. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199666416.003.0007

Mitchell, J. (2026, September 9). The Puzzle of Perceptual Presence and Imagination. The Junkyard of the Mind. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2026/9/6/the-puzzle-of-perceptual-presence-and-imagination

Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. The MIT Press.

Sartre, J.-P. (2004). The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination (J. Webber, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1940)

A post by Eleanor Helms

Philosophy has been using thought experiments from its earliest beginnings. Recall Zeno’s Achilles and the tortoise, Plato’s ring of Gyges, and Lucretius’ spear thrown at the edge of the universe. In all that time, you might think philosophers would have come to some agreement about how they work. (Then again, have you met philosophers?) In my recent book Kierkegaard and The Structure of Imagination (Cambridge, 2025), I propose a new explanation of what thought experiments do. The book takes a deep dive into the history of the concept, all the way back to Kant, whose views also inspired the Danish thinkers Hans Christian Ørsted and Søren Kierkegaard. I argue that thought experiments provide what Kant called “cognition.” Kant famously worried that concepts without perceptions were empty (CPR A51/B75). Ordinarily, a concept like “cat” gets filled in by experiencing (wait for it . . .) a cat. But there are some concepts, like the idea of the universe as a whole, that can be thought but not cognized because there are no instances of “universe” that could appear in our experience. (We can experience objects in the universe, but not the universe itself.)

Unlike knowledge, cognition does not require taking anything to be true. Instead, cognition is a way of connecting concepts with sensations. It’s about meaning, not belief. But I argue in the book that cognition is still a valuable epistemic good. It’s a good thing all around for us to be minutely aware of how (or whether) our concepts attach to perceptible objects. However, there are some useful concepts that don’t map onto sensory objects directly. To cognize abstract concepts like the universe (or the self, or God, or freedom, or justice, or altruistic love . . .), we need some new and creative sources of cognition. But are other bases for cognition even allowed? Cognition is about filling in concepts with sensory content, specifically. Can we have a relation to sensory material that doesn’t belong to a perceived object? As strange as it might seem, Kant describes not one but three non-perceptual sources of cognition. In my book, I show how thought experiments can facilitate all three. They are: practical cognition, analogy, and construction (a method borrowed from geometry). The book focuses mainly on construction, but I’ll say a little about each one.

Thought experiments facilitate practical cognition when they describe a situation and ask me what I would do (e.g., Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine) or what someone should do. Practical cognition for Kant ultimately aims at morality, as the way to achieve the highest possible good. Many of the familiar ethical thought experiments fit here, as we have to choose what to prioritize (e.g., trolley problems). While it’s common in imagination debates to emphasize “central” perspective-taking or simulation, Kant doesn’t think we need to place ourselves within a situation imaginatively in order to judge it: what matters is just the filling in of abstract rules by representing them in a concrete context. We draw on practical cognition when we show children moral exemplars, which Kant thinks “elevate the soul and awaken a wish to be able to act in like manner oneself” (4:412n, and see Fremstedal 2022, Kaftanski 2024). What makes these exemplary actions moral (rather than, say, self-interested) won’t be outwardly visible, but the cases still lend their concrete material to moral principles by motivating us to reach for them in specific (real or imagined) situations.

Thought experiments can also work as analogies. One obvious contemporary case is Thomson’s sick violinist, where she builds an analogy between this kidnapping case and abortion. The thought experiment proposes that these materially dissimilar situations have analogous formal structures. Kant’s example of analogy is a hand mill as analogous to a despotic state (CPJ 5:352, see Pillow 2001). A hand mill does not instantiate a despotic state, but it turns our attention to its relevant structures in a perceptible (non-despotic) object.

Lastly, I argue that thought experiments in philosophy do the same work as construction in geometry. Hans Christian Ørsted, who was the first to use the term “thought experiment” in any language, proposes this connection. Geometers “construct” figures when they draw according to rules, using tools like a compass and straight edge. The resulting diagram does not perfectly instantiate the ideal figure (its lines will have some thickness, for example), but the process of drawing it still matters cognitively for the geometer. More than the result, the process of constructing the diagram exhibits some of its features as essential. I argue that thought experiments “construct” when they highlight relevant features of a situation to an imaginer and show why they have to be (or don’t have to be) a certain way. For example, Gettier problems reveal that not just any justification counts as knowledge. Frankfurt cases identify what matters for autonomy. As constructions, thought experiments guide attention to certain features of a target concept. Comprehending concepts in these three ways fills them in with concrete material, even when we cannot perceive instances of what we have in mind.

My overall claim is that thought experiments are mainly about achieving cognitions and (therefore) meaningful concepts. Alternatively, some contemporary accounts treat thought experiments as second-best placeholders for real (e.g., laboratory) experiments. That view is more common than one might think (Friedman 2002, Norton 2004, Buzzoni 2019), perhaps because so much of the recent scholarship on thought experiments has taken place in philosophy of science journals. The paradigmatic cases aren’t Plato, Thomson, and Gettier but Galileo, Einstein, and Schrödinger. In the sciences, it makes a lot of sense to say that thought experiments stand in for real experiments. But what about philosophy? Ethicists, epistemologists, and metaphysicians can’t usually confirm their hypotheses with empirical studies. Consider Frank Jackson’s Mary. Even if we could contrive a similar scenario, we would be left with Mary’s report of what she feels and whether, in her opinion, what she feels is new. In the same way, sending real trolleys down tracks would tell us what people tend to choose, but we’d be no better able to make the kinds of conceptual distinctions that Foot and Thomson want us to make.

Early work on thought experiments characterized philosophical uses of thought experiments as derived from scientific ones (Sorensen 1992). Until astonishingly recently (into the 1990s, and I found some as late as 2010), it was common to misattribute the first use of the term “thought experiment” (Gedankenexperiment) to Mach. The story told from there is that thought experiments act as (1) placeholders for future empirical experiences (Buzzoni 2019) and (2) access points for past experiences stored implicitly in memory (Gendler 2013). But H.C. Ørsted had used the term 80 years earlier—in 1812, in both German and Danish (Tanke-experiment)—to describe mental experiments in science, math, and philosophy. And unlike Mach, who was dismissive of Kant, Ørsted had a deep, life-long interest in transcendental philosophy, including the problem of cognizing abstract concepts.

Fair warning, the book takes a deeper dive into the history of philosophy than might appeal to everyone: Kant, Ørsted, and Kierkegaard—Ørsted’s contemporary, who also used the term (Tanke-experiment) well before Mach. And of course, the fact that Ørsted and Kierkegaard used the term first doesn’t guarantee a Kantian foundation is better. But I think it’s valuable to chart different paths through the history of philosophy. Roads not taken (or not taken by many) offer new ways to think about familiar things. In the Kant-inspired account I put forward in the book, I aim to shift debates away from how (or whether) thought experiments provide knowledge toward an appreciation for cognition as its own kind of epistemic good. Cognition allows us to establish common and durable points of reference. And it keeps being valuable even when we’re talking about things that don’t exist and never could. Thought experiments aren’t the only tool for communicating abstract ideas. Elijah Chudnoff argues that philosophy papers—even the ones without thought experiments—make complex mental experiences repeatable (2021: 201-03). But re-thinking a thought isn’t the same as cognizing it. Thought experiments are the best tools philosophers have, I argue, for tethering our thoughts to the material stuff of reality.

References

Buzzoni, Marco. 2019. “Thought Experiments in Philosophy: A Neo-Kantian and Experimentalist Point of View.” Topoi 38(4): 771–9.

Chudnoff, Elijah. 2021. Forming Impressions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Fremstedal, Roe. 2022. Kierkegaard on Self, Ethics, and Religion: Purity or Despair. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Fremstedal, Roe. 2014. Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest Good: Virtue, Happiness, and the Kingdom of God. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Friedman, Michael. 2002. “Kant, Kuhn, and the Rationality of Science.” Philosophy of Science 69(2): 171–190.

Gendler, Tamar Szabó. 2013. Thought Experiment: On the Powers and Limits of Imaginary Cases. New York: Routledge.

Kaftanski, Wojciech. 2024. “Imagination, Mental Representation, and Moral Agency: Moral Pointers in Kierkegaard and Ricoeur.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 23:179–198.

Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Norton, John D. 2002. “Why Thought Experiments Do Not Transcend Empiricism.” In Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Science, pp. 44-66. Edited by Christopher Hitchcock. Oxford: Blackwell.

Pillow, Kirk. 2001. “Jupiter’s Eagle and the Despot’s Hand Mill: Two Views on Metaphor in Kant.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59(2): 193–209.

Sorensen, Roy. 1992. Thought Experiments. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A post by Alyssa Walker

In an Instagram post, lyricist Sophie Hunter tells viewers that the title for her debut rap album, Stereoscope, came from the rediscovery of her grandparents 3D wedding photos in the wake of their passing. Two photos are printed on each slide, and when they are viewed through binoculars, they merge into a single, 3D image. Hunter reports having struggled to find a theme for her album, which includes both “unserious and fun” and “dark and earnest” tracks. The memory of the stereographic images presented an opportunity to unite the range under a single heading. She says, “via stereoscope, we gain dimension by looking at two different perspectives of the same thing. The truth of me, and the music, and maybe life, was not one side or another but the space between. The collage made of their distance, like a left and right eye, their difference creates depth – turns two dimensions to three” (Hunter @sophiehunter.mp3 2026).

I think the right way to think about Hunter’s process is as imaginative. However, my understanding of what this entails departs from the common understanding expressed in the literature. It is typical in papers on imagination to refer to imaginative states, imaginative attitudes, imaginative projects, imaginative experiences, etc. In these exchanges, what seems to be meant is that the imaginative just is an instantiation of a state of imagination or an attitude of imagination, and so on. The assumption at work thus seems to be that what it means for something to be imaginative is entirely reducible to instances of imagination.[i] 

I think we should reject this reductive picture as well as the underlying assumption that imagination and the imaginative are simply interchangeable. We can’t get at what it means to say that Hunter is imaginative by saying that she is in, e.g., a state of imagination. Like Jones and Wilkinson (2021), I will suggest that we should pull the imagination and the imaginative apart from one another.

One reason for this is that there are clear instances of imagination that are not imaginative. Let’s say that imagination involves mental images essentially. Some mental images are not imaginative because they are simple. I can imagine a color – say, blue. Nothing seems imaginative about my imagining of blue. And I think this generalizes beyond imagistic theories of imagination: no matter what one takes to be the necessary and sufficient conditions of imagining, imagining blue just isn’t imaginative.

My goal in the rest of this post is to articulate a way of defining the imaginative that does not reduce it to the imagination. Before I do that, I want to put aside some other interesting ways that these concepts might be distinguished.

In his 2023 Junkyard Post, Max Jones suggests that imaginativeness has an evaluative sense and imagination has a descriptive sense. This distinction can be highlighted by considering what we mean by saying someone “lacks imagination”. We don’t mean that someone lacks the faculty or the ability to be in a certain kind of mental state. For, as Jones claims, we don’t apply this sense of the phrase to aphantasics. Rather what we mean is that someone lacks the capacity for being imaginative, and this lack is in something that is good to have.

I think that this is on the right track, but it doesn’t yet tell us what the evaluative sense tracks that the descriptive sense doesn’t. Jones also raises a concern that the two senses are too entangled to truly come apart. But I think we can get a handle on this sense of the imaginative.

Another way to separate the imagination and the imaginative is that the former is a mental act and the latter is a person-level trait. There might be something to this line of thinking, but it can’t be our bottom-line distinction. Talk of being imaginative is not restricted to persons; books or plots can be imaginative. Specific instances of imagining can be imaginative. The way a person thinks can be imaginative, or we can say specific instances of thought are imaginative. Even if the imaginative is best understood as a trait, traits still require instantiating mental acts over time. Thus, the best starting point for understanding the imaginative in a non-reductive manner is not as a person-level trait in contrast to a mental act.

I contend that the imaginative should be understood as the manipulation of information by moving it among settings. Being imaginative consists in flexible thinking. This explains the intuition that simple imaginings are not imaginative. Merely conjuring the image (or some mental content with an attitude of imagination) of a color does not involve moving information among settings. This understanding of the imaginative is also consistent with a variety of ways of understanding the representational (or non-representational) nature of the imagination. As such, we can remain agnostic about what kind of vehicle is required in the manipulation of information across settings (at least at this juncture), while also noticing that no matter how one represents some content in the imagination, not all of it will count as imaginative.

I want to highlight just one experimental datum to motivate this position. Veraksa, Gavrilova, and Veraksa (2022) compared findings on an imagination task with measurements taken from a cognitive flexibility task (a Wisconsin Card Sorting Task). Provided with simple images, 206 6-7-year-olds were instructed to complete a drawing by adding details or additional objects. For example, a participant who received the image of a circle might add spikes around it to create an image of a sun, or they might use the circle as tires on a car (5). The authors discovered that the number of categories into which the completed drawings fell correlated with cognitive flexibility as measured by the WCST: the higher the number of categories, the more cognitively flexible.

The importance of Veraksa et al.’s experiment turns on the fact that the imagination task requires moving information among settings. In order to complete the drawing, participants had to move the information about a circle, for example, to settings where circles, or globes, or spheres, are component elements. Since they found that this correlates with cognitive flexibility, we have at least a motivating reason to think that manipulating information in a move among settings is flexible thinking.

If you follow me in thinking that what the children are doing is imaginative, then we also have a reason for discounting another way of defining the imaginative. Grant (2011, 2013) thinks the imaginative is synonymous with creativity, which requires non-obviousness and plausibility. I think we can agree that the children probably come up with plausible drawings where circles are components, but a drawing of the sun and a car are not non-obvious ways of doing this. So, the imaginative doesn’t seem to reduce to creativity either (at least not as how Grant defines it).

Let’s return to the example of Sophie Hunter. What makes her imaginative? She moves information about her grandparents’ wedding photos to the setting of her debut album. Before she was reminded of the wedding photos, they were not a part of the same set of considerations and elements that make up her album. She had to bring this information to bear on information about her album. She reconceived of what made her album an integrated whole on the basis of the stereographic images. This is flexible manipulation of information from one setting to another.

My claim here has clear connection to what Kind (2022) has argued regarding learning to imagine. Being a good imaginer involves knowing when to impose or release oneself of certain constraints, exercising our “combinatorial capacities”, and developing a store of experiential resources (39). The difference, I would maintain, is that the combinatorial capacities are the focus and have to be used in the right sort of ways. Only when we move information among settings are we more than just a good imaginer – we are imaginative.   

Notes:

[i] Alternatively, we might think, like Wiltsher (2023), that the reductive relationship goes the other way.

References

Grant, James. 2011. “The Value of Imaginativeness.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90  (2): 275–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2011.574143.

Grant, James Eric. 2013. The Critical Imagination. Oxford University Press.

Hunter, Sophie [@sophiehunter.mp3]. “STERESCOPE, my debut album out July 17…”.   Instagram, 16 July 2026, https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZqFajxxYMB/?stkn=ZnRqY3AxbDltYzdu

Jones, Max. 2023. “Why Is It Good to Use Your Imagination? And Is This Something to   Worry About?” The Junkyard, December 6. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2023/12/2/why-is-it-good-to-use-your imagination-and-is-this-something-to-worry-about.

Jones, Max and Wilkinson, Sam. 2021. “Which Came First? Creative Practices or Imagination?” The Junkyard, 27 October. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2021/10/23/which-came-first-creative practices-or-imagination?rq=imaginative

Kind, Amy. 2022. “Learning to Imagine.” British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (1): 33–48. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayab037.

Veraksa, Nikolay, Margarita Gavrilova, and Aleksander Veraksa. 2022. “‘Complete the Drawing!’: The Relationship between Imagination and Executive Functions in Children.” Education Sciences (Switzerland) 12 (2): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12020103.

Wiltsher, Nicholas. 2023. “Imagination as a Process.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (2): 434–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12861.

A post by Wojciech Kaftanski

Søren Kierkegaard is hardly a household name among the “imagination professionals.” One would look in vain for his name in the indexes of standard or classical analytic essay collections on imagination. For many outside the Kierkegaardian bubble, knowledge of the Dane is limited to a deranged religious thinker who publicly dumped his girlfriend Regine Olsen only to dedicate his corpus to her and send her veiled love letters long after she remarried. Wrapping one’s head around that romantic strategy requires a level of imagination few of us possess, I fear. Unsurprisingly, Kierkegaard is routinely reduced to a rite of passage for certain graduate students. Many of us have seen them: pacing the department corridors during a mandatory existentialist phase to debate the meaning of life while wearing heavy scarves, trench coats, and turtlenecks—wait, no, the turtlenecks are Foucault, my apologies.

But there is more to the Great Dane than the cheerful, late-night-dorm-room themes of suffering, death, anxiety, guilt, and martyrdom. Beneath the existential angst lies a highly sophisticated theory of the mind that speaks to contemporary debates. Crucially, Kierkegaard argues that imagination is not a peripheral cognitive luxury but the very engine of human selfhood. Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus (I know, a bit lame) he drops this programmatic “bomb” in The Sickness unto Death:

The fantastic, of course, is most closely related to the imagination, but the imagination in turn is related to feeling, knowing, and willing; therefore a person can have imaginary feeling, knowing, and willing. As a rule, imagination is the medium for the process of infinitizing; it is not a capacity, as are the others – if one wishes to speak in those terms, it is the capacity instar omnium [for all capacities]. When all is said and done, whatever of feeling, knowing, and willing a person has depends upon what imagination he has, upon how that person reflects himself – that is, upon imagination. (Kierkegaard, 1849/1980).

For Kierkegaard, imagination is the structural condition for the possibility of all other mental operations. It is the mandatory psychological “medium” through which our affective states, epistemic commitments, and volitional drives are unified into a coherent self. Far from being a mere playground for counterfactual drift or aesthetic escapism, the imagination is the baseline coordinator of our propositional attitudes. Some history of philosophy here, bare with me. By framing imagination as the architectonic engine of the self, Kierkegaard stakes a definitive claim in a familiar historical debate. He positions his work as a rigorous response to the post-Kantian landscape, occupying the volatile space between his predecessors. Hume had splintered the self into a bundle of shifting perceptions. Kant bound it within the categories, while the German Romantics dissolved it into unreserved creativity. Kierkegaard absorbs all three positions, enforcing a strict structural discipline to ask a critical question: How can a fragmented bundle of experiences ever achieve the unity required for moral and existential agency without discarding the power of affect? His answer—yes, you guessed it—is the imagination.

Let’s unpack some of it.[1] For Kierkegaard, the imagination is fundamentally a moral faculty. It is intrinsically connected to the three critical pillars of the person/selfhood: feeling, thinking, and volition. We engage these three capacities in everyday functioning; they shape our preferences, structure our moral codes, and “color” how we relate to our past and future.

Consequently, while the imagination is busy with its standard cognitive duties—memory, spatial visualization, or recombining sensory data—it is simultaneously operating as the primary engine of self-making. Because constructing a self is our ultimate existential responsibility for Kierkegaard, the imagination inherits a heavy moral weight. Its ultimate target is the object of our deepest moral concern: the self.

Like a muscle, the imagination can be trained (though Kierkegaard declines to provide a practical workout routine), meaning it can operate both spontaneously and intentionally. However, it can easily lead us astray—and I will list some normative restrictions for the imagination in a second. Moreover, Kierkegaard does not equate imagination with pure knowledge operations, and he allows its contents—imaginary mental objects—to be both propositional and pictorial. Sometimes his goal is for us to picture something vividly; at other times, he simply wants us to consider a state of affairs or a situation without much emphasis on its imagistic aspect. However, he remains fundamentally committed to the view that the vivid-pictorial affects us more deeply than a simple proposition. This is because we are naturally hardwired to be moved by the visual—which is often inherently affective and therefore slips quickly underneath our usual cognitive register.

When Kierkegaard writes that “imagination is the medium for the process of infinitizing,” he is issuing a warning. Because the imagination supercharges our feelings, thoughts, and will, this “infinitizing” process can go beautifully right or catastrophically wrong. Here are some examples that illustrate the goods and the bads of ininitizing imagination with motion picture suggestions that take up these topics.

1. Feeling:

• The Positive (Passion): Imagination develops a momentary, reflexive feeling(s) into an enduring, intensive passion, such as a sustained commitment to caring for others. This commitment is what structures the self over time. See The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).

• The Negative (Sentimentality): Imagination inflates a passing emotion into a detached sentimentality divorced from reality. This is someone who weeps over abstract human suffering but callously ignores a homeless person on the street. They love the concept of humanity, but bypass actual humans. See Amélie (2001).

2. Thinking:

• The Positive (Strategic Projection): Imagination transforms concrete perceptions into abstract concepts and infinite possibilities, such as mapping out the creative, long-term steps needed to achieve a career goal. See The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté) 2005.

• The Negative (Cognitive Bubbles): Reflection morphs into an endless, ever more refined, yet dizzying maze of possibilities. The thinker retreats into a bubble of pleasurable wishful thinking, morally and psychologically unconcerned with the immediate present and entirely blind to the limitations of reality. See Synecdoche, New York (2008).

3. Volition:

• The Positive (Autonomy): Imaginatively-enhanced volition synthetically presents the will with high-level reasons for large commitments—acting as a 19th-century precursor to Harry Frankfurt’s second-order volitions. See Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).

• The Negative (Imaginative Paralysis): The will is paralyzed by an infinite buffet of choices where everything looks equally appealing. Because choosing one concrete path requires killing off all other options, the individual chooses nothing at all. See Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018).

On an ending note, I want to mention a recent book that perhaps is the sign that the tides are moving into the cognitive exploration of Kierkegaard’s imagination. In her Kierkegaard and the Structure of Imagination: Rethinking Thought Experiments with Kant and Ørsted (CUP, 2025), Eleanor Helms brings attention to Kierkegaard’s use of “imaginary constructions,” presenting them as a systematic philosophical method shaped by Kantian transcendental philosophy and Ørsted’s scientific framework. She frames the Kierkegaardian imagination as a structured cognitive faculty essential for clarifying abstract and existential truths. Kierkegaard’s thought experiments operate like imaginative variation to make unrepresentable concepts accessible. (Editor’s note: Look out for a Junkyard post from Eleanor Helms later this month.)

To explore further the scholarship on Kierkegaard’s imagination, dive into the works of Patrick Stokes (2010, 2015), Anthony Aumann (2023, 2026), Jeffrey Hanson (2021), Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal (2021), and yours truly (2021, 2024).

Notes:

[1]  For those suffering from insomnia or chronic existential boredom: shameless self-promotion alert. Keep an eye out for a volume in the Cambridge University Press Elements series dropping online at the end of this year, under the working title Kierkegaard’s Moral Imagination: Feeling, Knowing, Willing, authored by yours truly.

References:

Aumann, Antony. (2023). Art, Imagination, and Experiential Knowledge. Synthese, 201(3), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04109-2

Aumann, Antony. (2026). How Art Transforms Us: A Philosophical Inquiry. Bloomsbury Academic.

Becker-Lindenthal, Hjördis. (2021). Kierkegaard on imagination: possibility, hope, and the imitation of Christ. History of European Ideas, 47(3), 484–499. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2020.1799558

Helms, E. (2025). Kierkegaard and the structure of imagination: Rethinking thought experiments with Kant and Ørsted. Cambridge University Press

Hanson, Jeffrey (2021). Imagination, Suffering, and Perfection: A Kierkegaardian Reflection on Meaning in Life. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 38(4), 337–356.

Kaftanski, Wojciech T. (2021). Introduction: Imagination in Kierkegaard and Beyond. History of European Ideas, 47(3), 405–413. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2020.1799552

Kaftanski, W. (2024). Imagination, Mental Representation, and Moral Agency: Moral Pointers in Kierkegaard and Ricoeur. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 23(1), 179–198. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09813-x

Kierkegaard, Søren (1949/1980). The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Eds. & Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Stokes, Patrick. (2010). Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: Interest, Self and Moral Vision. Palgrave Macmillan.

Stokes, Patrick. (2015). The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity. Oxford University Press.

A post by Megan Entwistle

You’re reading a novel on the train. You’re engrossed in your private, fictional world of characters and intrigue. As you turn a page, you feel the person sitting next to you shift in their seat. Suddenly you realize: they’ve been reading over your shoulder!

Why is this so disconcerting?

For a number of reasons, surely. Perhaps it feels like they’re in your personal space. Perhaps you feel you’ve been observed for a long time without noticing. Or perhaps it’s that your imaginative experience was not, as you had assumed, so private after all.

That last reaction is a little odd. You aren’t the first to read that particular novel and you won’t be the last. You like to read book reviews, lend your favorite books to your friends, and swap interpretations. Nevertheless, there is something different about the very same words at the very same time evoking (the very same?) images in a very real person next to you.

This blog post is about that difference: the difference between imagining alone, and imagining with others.

There are a number of actions we undertake simply alongside, or in parallel with, others. Think how many people can shop for groceries at the same time. I might reach for a can of tomatoes just as you do. We have to coordinate our behavior to some extent, so as not to reach for the very same can. But we aren’t shopping together. That would require, according to Margeret Gilbert’s influential account of joint action, a joint intention or “commitment”, whereby we espouse certain goals as a collective body (2013).

These goals need not be particularly complex. Two children can commit to a pretense: one invites the other for a tea party. They take turns making moves in the game, relying on shared scripts, props and physical gestures to move the story forward. The first child pours the imaginary tea. The second child spits it out in imagined disgust. The first child can accept this elaboration of the story without exiting the pretense, say by cleaning up the tea, or offering a second cup with sugar. But if the other child continues to change the rules of the game in a way the first finds unacceptable, their diverging commitments will lead to a breakdown in joint action. “We’re not playing anymore”, the first child might declare.

Not all varieties of imagining are quite so action-like as pretense (Kind 2013). Joint imaginative activities often have clearly circumscribed goals, roles, and standards for cooperation – compare an acting troupe performing a play, a couple redecorating their living room, or an art class painting a community mural. However, once we narrow our focus to the individual psychological processes these activities recruit, the story about joint imagining becomes more complicated.

Take a purely experiential kind of imagining, like visual imagination. I can conjure up an image of a snow-covered, barren prairie winter landscape with ease. I can describe such scenes from my childhood to you, inviting you to picture the scene. Although it is an open question whether two people can truly imagine the same thing, and what the criteria for imaginative success are (see Nick Wiltsher’s recent Junkyard post on this topic), I am going to assume here a working conception of two different mental representations with shared contents. What I am interested in is not whether two people can imagine the same thing, but whether they can jointly imagine the same thing. What could this difference consist in?

Here’s what it is thought to amount to in the case of visual perception. According to John Campbell (2005), two perceivers form a triadic relation with an object of perception when, in addition to both attending to the same object, their respective experiences also contains an awareness of the other person as co-subject. Campbell’s classic example is the following:

Suppose that you are sitting on a park bench watching a swan and someone comes to sit beside you. Perhaps there is some rudimentary conversation. So you shift from solitary attention to the swan, through a condition in which both you and your neighbour are coincidentally watching the swan, to full joint attention (2005, p. 287).

The swan serves as a tether for the attentional resources of both viewers. This means, first, that they each selectively process some information in their visual field–such as the swan’s color and motion–at the expense of other available information–such as the patterns in the clouds above (Watzl 2011). Second, since the swan is an object in the public space occupied by the two viewers, they can each register the other as a fellow subject of perception by triangulating on the swan.

In contrast to Campbell’s purely perceptual model, Christopher Peacocke (2005) argues that the shift from parallel to joint attention requires, in addition, recursive mindreading capacities. In Peacocke’s view, attention is shared when each person attends to the swan, while knowing the other person is attending to the swan, while knowing that the other person, while attending to the swan, knows the very same thing…. And so on.

Although these theories are importantly different, they highlight a similar feature: jointness in the psychological realm is achieved when our respective mental states are made sufficiently public. Perceptual objects naturally afford the relevant publicity. They help us create a shared space. For instance, friends watching a movie together tend to be aware of the fact of each others’ viewership in such a way that attunes them to each other’s reactions in addition to the movie itself. Joint attention is a large part of why going to a cinema is a much different viewing experience than watching a movie at home.

What could play the role of objects of attention, for imagining? You might already be thinking that cinematic experiences exemplify not only joint attention, but joint imagining. For instance, it may be that I find a plot point or character more “believable” if I am aware of the crowd reacting as such; my imaginative engagement with the film is thus affected by the content of others’ engagement, and vice versa. If I go to a movie with my rather hard-to-impress coworker, I might encounter more imaginative resistance to the subtle moralizing than I otherwise would. Joint imagining is thus akin to joint attention to imagined objects, including the fictional worlds that films enjoin us to enter.

If the foregoing observations are on the right track, it would account for the greater comparative difficulty in making joint certain other, purely experiential, imaginings. My friend, with whom I am sharing my memories of a very cold childhood, lacks a tether to the relevant perceptual contents. I can describe my hometown at length to her, but I may fall short of making it fully accessible, a space she can visually recreate and project herself into. We might thus be unable to counterfactually imagine building snow forts as children together.

Other cases, by contrast, have featured the help of various “props”: think Campbell’s swan, the child’s teacup. On the view I’ve been gesturing towards, such props play an important role in establishing the shared space between imaginers that’s required for jointness.

This brings us back to the stranger on the train. Realizing they were reading over your shoulder does not suddenly make the imaginative experience joint. It rather makes the possibility of a shared experience salient, a possibility which can either be unnerving or welcome. You still have the option to ignore the other person, to not let your awareness of the publicly accessible written words include the other, in your mind, as a co-imaginer – even as it may include them, in your perceptual experience, as a co-attender.

What this reveals is that joint imagining is not just joint imaginative attention. It depends also on the attitudes one holds in undertaking an imaginative project. Like joint actions, you plausibly need to commit to entering a fictional world alongside the stranger, with all the emotional vulnerability that entails. And, depending on your personality, you just might! You can signal your openness by holding the book at a better angle for them, by engaging them in conversation about it, and myriad other ways. Or you might, as I did, prefer to keep the story to yourself.

References

Campbell J (2005) Joint attention and common knowledge. In: Eilan N, Hoerl C, McCormack T, Roessler J (eds) Joint Attention: communication and other minds: issues in philosophy and psychology. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Gilbert, M (2013). Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World. Oxford University Press.

Kind, A (2013). The Heterogeneity of the Imagination. Erkenntnis 78 (1): 141-159.

Peacocke, C. (2005). “Joint Attention: Its Nature, Reflexivity, and Relation to Common Knowledge”. in Naomi Eilan, and others (eds), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Consciousness & Self-Consciousness Series (Oxford, 2005; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Sept. 2010)

Watzl, S. (2011). The nature of attention. Philosophy compass, 6(11), 842-853.

A post by Anhui Huang

Fictions are Instructions for Make-Believe

Tonight I am in the mood to cook. So I open New York Times Cooking and find myself a recipe: Ali Slagle’s Sheet-Pan Feta with Chickpeas and Tomatoes. The first item under “Ingredients” is “3 cups cooked chickpeas, drained, rinsed, and shaken dry.”

So I go to the grocery store and purchase two cans of chickpeas. When I get home, I drain the liquid, rinse them, shake them dry, and measure out three cups.

This is an ordinary case of following the instructions in a recipe. Notice, though, that the recipe never explicitly tells me to do these things. Instead of saying “Purchase some chickpeas. Then drain them and rinse them…”, it simply lists the chickpeas as an ingredient and describes the state that it needs to be in. Still, I understand what I am supposed to do, because I know what a recipe is and how it is supposed to be interpreted.

I think fiction works the same way.

A work of fiction doesn’t typically say: “Now imagine there is a car. Now imagine that the car is moving and some other cars are chasing it…” But I know what I am supposed to imagine or make-believe, because I know what fiction is, and I am familiar enough with the rules and conventions for interpreting fiction. I know, for example, that quotation marks typically instruct me to make-believe that certain words are spoken, and that a shot following a shot of a character's gaze typically instructs me to make-believe that it represents what the character sees.

A work of fiction, I propose, stands in the same relation to imaginative activity that a recipe stands in to cooking: a fictional work is the author’s instructions for how to engage in imaginative activity. Fictional engagement is then a collaborative practice between the author and the audience. The author gives instructions for how to engage in various imaginative activities, and the audience interprets and follows these instructions.

Truth in Fiction

How, then, should we understand truth in fiction? What makes it true that in Harry Potter Hermione is a good witch and is at least three feet tall, and false that Voldemort has purple hair?

Two existing accounts are particularly illuminating here: Kendall Walton’s (1990) and Gregory Currie’s (1990).

According to Walton, fictions are props for make-believe, much like the objects that children play around with in their games of make-believe. Just as the shape and color of the banana prescribe make-believing it as a yellow telephone, so too do fictional works prescribe certain kinds of make-believe. What is true in a fiction is what is prescribed to be make-believed by the props that are fiction.

According to Currie, when we consume a work of fiction, we are really imagining that some reliable informant is telling us about what has happened. Currie calls this imagined informant the “fictional author” (Currie 1990, 75-80), a reliable, historically situated fictional character that we construct and take to be telling us the story as known fact. The fictional author is distinct from both the actual author of the fictional work and the explicit narrator (if there is one): unlike the actual author, the fictional author belongs to the fictional world; and unlike the explicit narrator, the fictional author is always reliable. For Currie, a claim is true in fiction just in case an informed reader can reasonably infer that the fictional author believes that claim.

My own view is very much inspired by these two accounts of fiction, but it differs from each of them in important respects. However, the point of this entry is not to argue against Walton’s and Currie’s accounts, though both accounts face some problem cases that they struggle to explain (See e.g., Walton 1990, 161-9; Matravers 1995, 121-2; Byrne 1993, 29). Rather, I want to suggest a new way of understanding fiction that preserves what I take to be the core insights of these accounts, one that centers on the idea that fictions are instructions for make-believe.

If we understand fictions as instructions for make-believe, then there is a natural answer for what is true in fiction. As a first pass, we might say: a claim is true in a fiction just in case the fiction contains the author’s instructions to make-believe that claim.

But this is not quite right, for it raises an obvious question: how do we determine what a fictional work instructs us to make-believe?

This is where the analogy with ordinary communication comes in handy. Giving and receiving instructions is a form of communication, and all communication depends on some mutually shared assumptions about the competence and cooperativeness of the speaker, or in this case, the author. This is an important insight from Paul Grice (1989). When I ask you where I can get water, and you tell me there is a gas station nearby, I take you to communicate that the gas station sells water. Why do I get to think that? Because I assume that you are trying to provide a truthful and relevant answer to my question. In other words, I have to be charitable in interpreting you. But I can’t be too charitable. If you say, “The King of France is visiting England,” I can’t reasonably interpret you as saying “The president of the United States is visiting England” just because there is no King of France. In interpreting a speaker, I must keep a balance between charitability and reasonableness.

Similarly, when I interpret a work of fiction, I have to keep that same kind of balance. I have to be reasonable: if I see a person get shot in the head in a movie, I can’t simply erase that event from the fiction, even if I think that is a bad plot. But I also have to be charitable: if the camera focuses on a vase for an unusually long period of time, for example, I should infer that it’s intentional—perhaps that the vase will play an important role later—and not just a careless mistake. So we can make our previous formulation of truth in fiction a bit more precise. Let’s say that a claim is true in a fiction just in case we can reasonably and charitably interpret that fiction as containing the author’s instruction to make-believe that claim.

So like Walton, I take the activity central to fictional engagement to be imagination, or make-believe, and I agree with his basic idea that what is true in fiction is, roughly speaking, what is to be make-believed; but unlike Walton, I take fictions to play the role of instructions, rather than that of props, in directing our make-believe. Like Currie, I take fictional engagement to be a collaborative activity governed by shared assumptions, conventions, and norms; but unlike Currie, I take the collaboration to be taking place between the audience and a real author, rather than a fictional author. The biggest difference between my account and theirs is the role of the real author. Walton and Currie place very little importance on the real author, whereas for me the real author’s role is central to explaining our engagement with fiction, including our interpretation of what is truth in fiction.

Authorial Authority

The role of the real author matters because it allows us to think about authorial authority over our imaginative activity. Generally, we take the author of a fiction to have authority over the story: they get to decide what is true in the fiction. But what explains that authority?

On my view, the author’s authority comes from their role as instructor. When I choose to cook according to a recipe, I am prepared to do whatever the recipe says to do; similarly, when I choose to consume a work of fiction, I am prepared to imagine whatever the author instructs me to imagine. And why do I choose to do that in the first place? Presumably it’s because I think the recipe will allow me to make a nice dish, and that a work of fiction will give me an engaging and valuable imaginative experience.

Such a presumption can also be challenged in various ways. Suppose the recipe says to boil the pasta for an hour. Most of us would probably hesitate and reconsider whether to follow this recipe. When an instructor turns out to be bad at their job, they lose their authority. The same should apply to fiction. If the author instructs me to imagine a square that is also a circle, for example, I might wonder whether the author is competent enough to guide me in imagination. As a result, I might ignore this particular piece of instruction, or even more likely, be taken out of the fiction altogether. In this way, the author can lose their authorial authority.

This helps to explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance (Weatherson 2004; Nanay, 2010; Liao, 2016; among others), where an author fails to make certain things true, despite clearly intending to do so. But that is the topic for another day.

References

Byrne, Alex, 1993, “Truth in Fiction: The Story Continued”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 71(1): 24–35.

Currie, Gregory, 1990, The Nature of Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Liao, Shen-Yi, 2016, “Imaginative Resistance, Narrative Engagement, Genre”, Res Philosophica, 93(2): 461–482.

Matravers, Derek, 1995, “Beliefs and Fictional Narrators”, Analysis, 55(2): 121–122.

Nanay, Bence, 2010, “Imaginative Resistance and Conversational Implicatures”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 60(240): 586–600.

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

Weatherson, Brian, 2004, “Morality, Fiction, and Possibility”, Philosophers’ Imprint, 4(3): 1–27.

A post by Antonello Caravelli

One of the central concepts in my PhD research is perspective. The term is ubiquitous in contemporary discussions of imagination. We are often told that imagination allows us to adopt the perspective of others or represent points of view different from our own. Yet the more I have worked on imagination, the more I have come to suspect that such discussions capture only one dimension of this term.

Perspective is typically treated as something represented within imagination. Philosophers and cognitive scientists ask whose perspective is imagined, which point of view is adopted, or how successfully we can imagine being someone else. Important as these questions are, they may overlook another role that perspective can play: rather than merely figuring in imaginative content, it can organise imaginative activity itself.

My claim is that perspective should be understood not only as something represented or adopted within imagination, but also as an organisational dimension of imaginative activity. In participative imagination, the imaginer's perspective helps structure which cognitive and affective resources are mobilised, which features become salient, and which possibilities are explored and developed.

Perspective operates at several levels within imagination. It may be represented in imaginative content (Vendler, 1984) and shape the phenomenology of imagining (Dokic and Arcangeli, 2015). In this post, however, I focus on the standpoint from which imaginative engagement unfolds. Shaped by a subject's history, social environment, and cognitive repertoire, it structures patterns of salience, emotional significance, and exploration.

Narrative engagement provides a particularly illuminating context for investigating this idea. Stories make visible aspects of imaginative activity that often remain unnoticed elsewhere. They allow us to observe not only what is imagined, but also how imaginative episodes unfold over time, acquire significance, and develop along different trajectories. Literature therefore offers a useful window onto the perspectival organisation of imagination itself.

From Propositional to Participative Imagination

Before examining how perspective operates in narrative engagement, it is useful to introduce a distinction that will structure the discussion that follows. Engagement with fiction can involve different forms of imagination, but for present purposes I group them under two broad labels.

On the one hand, there is propositional imagination: the capacity to entertain possibilities. We can imagine that dragons exist, that Napoleon won at Waterloo, or that Sherlock Holmes survived the Reichenbach Falls. Following broadly deflationary accounts (García-Carpintero, 2026), such episodes need not involve imagery, simulation, or immersive experience. For present purposes, I set aside the familiar question of whether or not propositional imagination differs from mere supposition.

On the other hand, engagement with fiction often involves a richer form of imaginative activity. Narrative experience may recruit sensory, experiential, constructive (Van Leeuwen, 2013), dramatic (Moran, 1994), and moral imagination (John, 2020), among others. Although these capacities differ in important respects, they share a common feature: they require the reader to actively engage with, explore, and develop an imagined scenario rather than merely entertain it. I will refer to this broader family of phenomena as participative imagination[1].

This distinction becomes particularly significant in the context of constructive imagination. Van Leeuwen characterises constructive imagination as the capacity to generate novel representations by drawing upon resources already available within the subject's cognitive economy, including memories, beliefs, perceptions, misperceptions, and cognitive biases. Imaginative activity is therefore not a matter of creating representations ex nihilo; rather, it involves the voluntary selection, recombination, and transformation of materials already available to the imaginer.

Yet this immediately raises a further question. If participative imagination depends on cognitive resources that are already available to the subject, what determines how those resources are selected, prioritised, and developed within a particular imaginative episode? Why do certain elements become salient while others remain peripheral? Why do some possibilities invite sustained exploration while others fade almost immediately?

My proposal is that the answer lies in the perspective of the imaginer. The resources available to us do not enter imaginative activity in a neutral or undifferentiated way. Our histories, dispositions, cognitive repertoires, and socio-cultural backgrounds influence how those resources are mobilised: what captures our attention, what acquires emotional significance, and which possibilities we are inclined to pursue.

This is why I think participative imagination is particularly closely connected to perspective. To participate imaginatively in a scenario is not merely to entertain a set of possibilities. It is to engage with and develop those possibilities through the particular cognitive and affective orientation that the imaginer brings to them. The relevant perspective is therefore not simply a point of view represented within the imagined scenario, nor merely a perspective temporarily adopted from another person. It is the standpoint from which the imaginer's own imaginative activity is organised.

What Happens When We Read?

Consider the following case. A novel presents a morally difficult situation. A woman fleeing a violent regime encounters an injured child hiding in the woods. Helping the child may expose her location and endanger her family. Leaving the child behind may save those she loves but will almost certainly condemn the child.

Every reader encounters roughly the same narrative situation. The same words appear on the page, and the same basic events are described. Yet readers often engage with the scenario in strikingly different ways. Some immediately focus on the child's vulnerability. Others focus on the woman’s obligations toward her family. Still others become absorbed by the uncertainty of the decision itself, exploring alternative outcomes and possible courses of action.

The fictional situation remains broadly constant. What differs is not just what is imagined, but how imagination develops around it. Different features become salient, different emotional responses are mobilised, and different possibilities attract further exploration.

This illustrates the role that the imaginer's perspective can play in organising imaginative activity. It does not merely determine a point of view within the imagined scenario; it helps shape attention, significance, and the paths along which imaginative exploration unfolds.

The example reflects a more general feature of literary engagement. Readers are not passive recipients of fictional content. Literary texts leave gaps, ambiguities, and indeterminacies that must be navigated through imaginative activity. Readers infer motives, construct environments, anticipate developments, evaluate actions, and respond emotionally to situations that exist only in imagination.

Narrative engagement is therefore a particularly clear instance of participative imagination. Readers draw upon memories, values, emotional dispositions, cultural expectations, and prior experiences in order to interpret and enrich fictional worlds. At the same time, engagement with fiction can reshape moral understanding, emotional sensitivities, and broader interpretive frameworks.

Imaginative engagement thus involves a continuous interaction between fictional content and the resources readers bring to it. The perspective of the reader helps organise this interaction, influencing which aspects of a fictional scenario become salient, how they acquire significance, and which possibilities are pursued as engagement unfolds. The difference therefore lies not primarily in the fictional world represented by the text, but in how that world is navigated and developed through imaginative activity.

At this point, a natural concern arises. If imagination is always perspectivally organised, does this imply that each reader inhabits a private fictional world? I do not think so. Perspectives do not emerge in isolation. They are formed within shared social, linguistic, and cultural environments. To borrow a Wittgensteinian (1953/1974) phrase, they develop within shared forms of life. Readers may differ in their experiences and commitments, but they also participate in common linguistic practices, narrative conventions, emotional repertoires, and cultural traditions. These shared resources make mutual understanding, disagreement, and collective interpretation possible. The perspectival character of imagination therefore introduces variation without collapsing into radical relativism.

Conclusion

Perspective should not be understood solely as an object represented within imagination. While perspectives can certainly become part of imaginative content, they also contribute to the organisation of imaginative activity itself. Narrative engagement makes this role particularly visible. Readers do not merely entertain fictional possibilities; they participate in the construction and development of imagined scenarios.

Perspective functions as part of the framework through which cognitive and affective resources are selected, prioritised, and deployed. It structures attention, significance, and the exploration of possibilities throughout imaginative engagement. On this view, perspective is not simply something imagination contains. It is the standpoint from which imaginative possibilities emerge as meaningful and worth pursuing.

Notes

[1]The underlying idea is not new. Philosophers have long suggested that imagination involves a form of participation that goes beyond mere hypothetical thinking. Walton's account of make-believe (1990) is perhaps the best-known example, and Tamar Gendler similarly argues that “imagination requires a sort of participation that mere hypothetical reasoning does not” (2000: 80). The label participative imagination, however, is borrowed from Voltolini and Barbero (2024)

References:

Dokic, J., & Arcangeli, M. (2015). “The Heterogeneity of Experiential Imagination.” In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds.), Open MIND: Philosophy and the Mind Sciences in the 21st Century, 431-450. MIT Press.

García-Carpintero, M. (2026). Truth and Reference in the Making of Fiction. Cambridge University Press.

Gendler, T. S. (2000). “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance.” The Journal of Philosophy, 97(2), 55-81.

John, E. (2020). “Moral Imagination, Fiction, and Meaning-Making.” Junkyard of the Mind. 09/30/2020 https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2020/9/27/moral-imagination-fiction-and-meaning-making

Moran, R. (1994). “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.” The Philosophical Review, 103(1), 75-106.

Van Leeuwen, N. (2013). “The Meanings of ‘Imagine’ Part I: Constructive Imagination.” Philosophy Compass, 8(3), 220-230.

Vendler, Z. (1984). The matter of minds. Clarendon Press.

Voltolini, A., & Barbero, C. (2024). “How One Cannot Participatively Imagine What One Could Cognitively Imagine.” Philosophia, 52(3), 643-660.

Walton, K. L. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Harvard University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953/1974). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell.

A post by Jonathan Mitchell

One puzzle which has animated philosophers of perception from the classical phenomenologists to the present day sometimes goes under the name of the ‘puzzle of perceptual presence’. Consider the following situation. Sitting in the park, looking at the oak tree opposite, what I seem to see is a complete three-dimensional thing, that is a bounded voluminous object. Yet from where I am sitting, I can only see the side of the tree facing me. Now, one side of a tree does not make a whole tree, and so what I am presented with from where I sit is somehow less than the whole tree. But at the same time, I don’t seem to be seeing a mere tree-façade, as something akin to a stage prop of a tree; much less a mere tree-like surface. What I am visually aware of as I sit there and look at the tree is nothing less than a complete three-dimensional thing, the ‘whole tree’. We can articulate the resulting puzzle more generally as follows: how is it the case that we can enjoy visual experiences as of complete three-dimensional entities given the fact that we are limited to seeing the side or sides facing us from a specific spatial perspective? How are these phenomenological facts to be reconciled?

In my recent book – A Sense of the Possible: The Horizons of Visual Experience (Oxford University Press, 2026) – I contend that we can solve this puzzle through a correct understanding of the role that a ‘sense of the possible’ plays in visual experiences. More specifically, what is required is a detailed and plausible account of the kind of awareness we enjoy of the sides and aspects of the relevant entities that are currently ‘out of view’, or otherwise occluded, but that nonetheless contribute to ‘making up’ the relevant complete three-dimensional object. The classical phenomenologists had a special term for this aspect of perceptual experience that ‘refers beyond’ what is currently presented of an object to its occluded sides, namely an intentional horizon.

Various accounts of what these intentional horizons consist in have been proposed, and so various purported solutions to the puzzle of perceptual presence are on the market. Here I want to mention one tempting, but in my view incorrect, account, namely one that draws on the role of imagination – I’ll call it the ‘imagination view’. Here is how the imagination view goes: a visual experience of an object as a complete three-dimensional entity consists in a visual component and a visualised component, that is, an imagistic representation of the occluded sides of the object. Jennifer Church articulates the view as follows:

When we see a tree, we imagine distinct perspectives on distinct parts of that tree, and it is the combination of those distinctive perspectives and parts that gives us the experience of the tree as a well-rounded object in space. (Church 2011: 76) 

Amy Kind suggests something similar:

Working in tandem with our perceptual capacities, our imaginative capacities contribute to our perceptual experience by making unseen features of objects seem present. As I’m looking at the Diet Coke can on my desk, it’s via a conjunctive effort of vision and imagination that I have the perceptual sense of the can as a voluminous whole. The front side of the can is seen; the back side of the can is imagined. (Kind 2018: 176)

Further details notwithstanding, this view runs into significant problems, two of which I explore here.

The first I’ll call the horizonal structural problem. Consider the following line of thought, separately from our puzzle of perceptual presence. When we visualise a material thing, say a cube, we visualise it perspectivally, in the sense that we don’t (and cannot) visualise all sides of the cube simultaneously. Put otherwise, in visualisation we still only enjoy, as we do in visual experience, a limited presentation of the facing sides of the material thing we are visualising. Nonetheless, we visualise a whole cube, not a cube-part, and so we seem to be drawn into thinking that visualisation, separately from visual experience, has its own problem of ‘presence’ in terms of how, in visualising a complete three-dimensional object, the ‘non-facing’ sides are given to us, and so a question arises concerning its putative ‘intentional horizons’.

If the above is right, then this causes problems for the imagination view, as a solution to the problem of perceptual presence. Let me explain why: a visualisation of the backsides of a cube, the front sides of which I can currently see, is not just some unstructured visualisation of mere cube-parts, but a perspectival visualisation as of a complete object, and so one which must have its own intentional horizon. But surely, we don’t want to say that when we see a cube, are perspectivally presented with its front sides, and putatively visualise its back sides, that internal to that visualisation is another visualisation of front sides relative to back sides – we don’t want to give a ‘more visualisation’ answer to the question concerning the putative intentional horizons of visualisation, including those visualisations that are supposedly constitutive of our visual experiences as of complete three-dimensional objects. But note that if we give a non-visualisation answer to what the intentional horizon of visualisation consists in, then the following problem arises: why can’t we just appeal to whatever is said there in answer to our original problem concerning the intentional horizons of visual experience, and so do away with appeal to visualisation entirely? The issues here concern the structure of visualisation itself and are motivated by the thought that if visualisation ‘mirrors’ the horizonal structure of visual experience then appealing to visualisation or imagination to solve the puzzle of perceptual presence pushes this puzzle one rung back to questions concerning the horizonal structure of visualisation.

The second problem I’ll call the unity-redundancy problem. Let’s grant for the sake of argument that when we visually experience an object as a complete three-dimensional thing, that this is, as Kind puts it, ‘a conjunctive effort of vision and imagination’; simply, we strictly see the facing sides and visualise the non-facing sides. We can now ask the following question: what supplies the ‘unity’ between vision and visualisation, in the sense that we enjoy a well-motivated rather than arbitrary ‘synthesis’ of different kinds of representations of the object (such that the representations are ‘joined up’ in the right way). At a minimum the following should hold: I have to be aware of the non-facing sides so represented in visualisation as making up for what is missing – what is not seen – in the visual presentation of the facing sides, and vice versa; I have to take the visual presentation of the facing sides as making up for what is missing – what is not visualised – in the visualised representation of the non-facing sides. It is only on this basis that I can justifiably take my perceptual representation of the object to be a unified representation of one and the same object, albeit from different perspectives.

However, if this is right, we get the following problem. If a unified representation of perception and imagination can only be ‘achieved’ as described above, then both presentations – vision and visualisation – must already include their own ‘horizonal references’ before any bringing together of vision and visualisation. The central line of thought is as follows: to make sense of the imagination view as yielding a plausible answer to how vision and visualisation can form a unified representation, it has to be the case that the different presentations of the object make up for what is missing in their counterparts. But if that is right, then prior to any ‘synthesising’ of vision and visualisation – to the forming of a unified representation – the original presentations already must involve what Husserl would call ‘empty horizonal references’ to parts of the object that could be ‘fulfilled’, that is could be given to us in a sensory representation of those parts of the object, but critically are not yet so given. However, if we accept this, then the imagination view looks to be redundant. Here is how Husserl puts the point: 

But that is already to say that every such imagination is a full phantasy, which could also exist for itself as a mere phantasy and which binds the presentation to the components that refer beyond. Likewise, it is to say that perception, even without phantasy, delivers a full representation, namely as presentation of the front side along with components that refer beyond. (Husserl 1907 [1907] §18: 48) 

Critically, we then have a situation in which the ‘horizonal references’ of visual experience cannot be explained by appeal to visualising the occluded sides of the objects we can see.

The two problems I have highlighted are by no means knock-down arguments against the ‘imagination view’ as a solution to the puzzle of perceptual presence, and this is not least because they depend on accepting some more or less controversial premises (e.g., concerning the ‘horizonal structure’ of visualisation, conditions on unified representations, etc). Nonetheless, they are difficult problems for the view to grapple with, and ones which, as far as I’m aware, haven’t been considered in detail by advocates of the view.

I think that we should look elsewhere than imagination for a solution to the puzzle of perceptual presence. We should look more towards distinctively visual forms of modal awareness characteristic of our experiences of complete objects; indeed, I explore such alternatives in my book, along with a range of other possible solutions.

References

Church, J. (2011) Possibilities of Perception. Oxford University Press.

Husserl, E. (1997 [1907]) Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. R. Rojcewicz, trans. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Kind, A. (2018) ‘Imaginative presence’, in F. Macpherson & F. Dorsch (eds.), Phenomenal Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mitchell, J. (2026) A Sense of the Possible: The Horizons of Visual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A post by Petronella Randell

Most of us are familiar with catastrophising; either because we do it ourselves, or because someone we know is prone to it. When going through airport security, I often imagine the various ways a smuggler could have concealed something in my bag without my knowing. Is someone with my name on the most wanted list? I wonder what it will be like to be mistakenly interrogated: how will I convince them I’m not Petronella Randell, but Petronella Randell? More prosaically: I don’t remember locking the door to my house. What will happen if the door isn’t locked? It’s easy to imagine all of these things and how awful they will be, typically also neglecting to think about practical steps to take if any of these things actually happen. 

The term ‘catastrophising’ was first coined by Ellis (1962) and was subsequently identified as a cognitive distortion by Beck et al. (1979), though what exactly catastrophising amounts to is less clear. Some say it involves believing that the worst will happen (Leung and Wong, 1998; Yurica and DiTomasso, 2005). Others say catastrophising involves magnifying the severity or probability of bad outcomes (Ellis, 1962; Horsham and Chung, 2013). It may reflect an intolerance of risky prospects (Carleton, Norton, & Asmundson, 2007) or be prompted by continuous ‘what-if?’ questioning of oneself (Davey and Levy, 1998; Meeten et al. 2012; Startup and Davey, 2003). Crucially (for us), it involves imagining the worst. It is an imaginative distortion (Roepke and Seligman, 2016; Torem, 2024).

There is a wealth of empirical evidence about our tendency to catastrophise and how this tendency can impact our physical and mental health. In a review, Gellatly and Beck (2016) found catastrophising to be a predictor of or correlated with: “panic, phobia, health anxiety, obsessive–compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, pain, and traumatic brain injury.” This is an incomplete list. However, that catastrophising is observed in so many conditions is testament to its prevalence.

It’s worth noting here that catastrophising sometimes is used as a catch-all term for any instance of imagining the worst, which can present real problems for patients. Stanford University’s recent ‘Rename Pain Catastrophising’ ran a survey of 2,911 participants which found that 32% of participants took ‘catastrophising’ to be a “stigmatising and perjorative” term (Webster et al.,2023).[1]

I won’t deny that catastrophising can be damaging to one’s mental and physical health. My aim is not to take on the psychologists from the armchair. Instead, I aim to argue that imagining the worst doesn’t always involve distorted thinking; it doesn’t always amount to catastrophising.[2] The central question to answer then is: given that catastrophising is near universally regarded as irrational or maladaptive, what makes it (in)appropriate to imaginatively explore the worst possibilities? How and when should we revise our beliefs in light of imagining the worst?

First, note that worst-case scenarios are used in the justification of a number of research programmes. Prior to efforts in the 1990s such as NASA’s Spaceguard survey, few Earth-crossing asteroids (i.e., asteroids that cross the Earth’s orbital path) had been recorded. In stating the importance of such a project, Morrison (1992: v) claimed that an asteroid impact could lead to ‘massive loss of food crops and possible breakdown of society’. Further examples include work on climate change, pandemics, natural disasters, the Manhattan project and many others.

It isn’t just researchers. We imagine the worst to inform everyday decisions, such as the decision to wear a seatbelt or helmet. Imagining or anticipating the worst has been normalised as a motivation for a number of precautionary behaviours. Consider that despite the fact that we are more likely to die on the way to the airport than in a plane crash, pre-flight safety demonstrations must, by law, be performed prior to lift off.

Imagining the worst must be permissible, at least sometimes. We expend significant time, money and effort in preventing or reducing the risk that the worst will happen. Indeed, we might even think people (governments, or corporations) are reckless if they fail to consider worst-case scenarios.

What distinguishes these kinds of cases from those we started with? Plenty of practical considerations will be relevant here: regulations, laws, conditions set out in insurance policies and so on. However, I’m interested in the epistemic profile of imagining the worst. When is imagining the worst permissible, and when does it go wrong? Can it be epistemically valuable? Imagining the worst might fall short of our epistemic ideals at three distinct locations: downstream effects on our epistemic state, the imaginative input, and the way the imagining unfolds from the imaginative input.

Epistemically disvaluable downstream effects are easiest to identify. Imagining the worst may lead us to believe that the worst will happen. If I conclude that someone with my name is on the most wanted list after imagining it, I’ve clearly made a bad inference! This explanation won’t always be applicable—those who imagine the worst don’t always believe that the worst will happen (Haerle, 2023). We are often able to recognise that our concerns are unlikely to materialise.

Additionally, this overlooks the role of the imagination in the formation of beliefs. Philosophers have recently argued that epistemic goods such as belief and justification can be gained from the imagination, as long as our imaginings are suitably constrained (Berto, 2018; Kind and Kung, 2016; Kind, 2016; 2018; 2021; Langland-Hassan, 2016; 2025). This gives us another lead: imagining the worst may be valuable or disvaluable insofar as it meets these constraints.

The most well-known constraints are Kind’s (2016:150-151) change and reality constraints. The reality constraint says that our imaginings should represent the world as we believe it to be. The change constraint says that when we imaginatively alter the world, we ought to do so by following the logical consequences of our interventions. If these conditions are met, we can learn from the imagination.

These constraints are eminently plausible. But, as it stands, imagining the worst will often adhere to the change and reality constraints—worst-case scenarios would not be concerning if they were not at least somewhat plausible or realistic. This doesn’t mean the proposed constraints on the imagination are wrong. Imagining the worst is an atypical use of the imagination; and as Kind (2016: 152) notes, the constraints are not necessary conditions on epistemically valuable imaginings. That said, I strongly suspect that further specification of the change and realty conditions would change this.

Whether an imagining is epistemically valuable depends on not only how an imagining unfolds, but the imaginative input it unfolds from. Which inputs we entertain and the form an imagined scenario takes will depend on the possibilities we take to be salient. Attention, then, may be another important part of the picture.

Munton (2025) emphasises that what we attend to determines whether we gain epistemic goods at all. If I am seeking out information relevant to my paper, I am not served by my attention being drawn to cat videos. While attention may be involuntary, at least sometimes we can direct our attention and cultivate it. For instance, by watching more cat videos, I am able to attend to the distinctive features of different breeds of cat.

If imagining the worst is not relevant to one’s task, it may mean that one is directing one’s attention in a suboptimal way. It fails to adhere to what Munton (2025: 73) calls the ‘norm of relevance’ on attention: optimal salience structures prioritise task-relevant information. Existential risk researchers adhere to this norm—they are aiming to find answers to questions about worst-case scenarios, so they attend to relevant possibilities when they imagine the worst. One who imagines the worst spontaneously, associatively, in response to no external prompting or active inquiry, attends in a non-ideal way. That is not to say that such imaginings never pay off, only that when a worst-case scenario is not relevant to what one ought to be attending to (insofar as one’s attention can be directed), we open ourselves up to criticism for attending to the wrong possibilities.

This criticism can be compounded by repeatedly attending to the same possibility. Sometimes, imagining the worst involves repeatedly imagining a particular worst-case scenario. Norms on inquiry can help us here, particularly, Haerle’s (2023) zetetic requirement. That requirement says that we ought not inquire into propositions we have sufficient evidence to settle. Friedman (2019) argues that we may damage our epistemic standing by inquiring into what we already believe or know. By imagining the worst when we shouldn’t, we may undermine our epistemic standing.

There is undoubtedly much more that philosophers have to say about imagining the worst and the rationality of catastrophising than outlined in this post. I only hope to have made the case that imagining the worst isn’t always irrational, contrary to the assumption that doggedly follows catastrophising. 

Notes

[1] See also this post by Gwenn Herman (2020) on the use of ‘catastrophising’ "Catastrophizing": A form of pain shaming - U.S. Pain Foundation.

[2] I suspect some catastrophising may not be irrational either, though I won’t pursue that here.

References

Beck, A. T., Rush, A., Shaw, B., & Emery, G. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. New York, NY, USA: Guilford.

Berto, F. (2018). Taming the runabout imagination ticket. Synthese, 1(8): 2029-2043.

Carleton, R. N., Norton, M. P. J., & Asmundson, G. J. (2007). Fearing the unknown: A short version of the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 21(1), 105-117.

Davey and Levy (1998) Internal statements associated with catastrophic worrying. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 26(1), 1998, 21-32

Ellis, A. (1962). Reason and emotion in psychotherapy. Lyle Stuart.

Gellatly, R., & Beck, A. T. (2016). Catastrophic thinking: A transdiagnostic process across psychiatric disorders. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 40(4), 441-452.

Friedman, J. (2019). Checking again. Philosophical Issues, 29, 84-96.

Haerle, P. H. (2023). Is OCD epistemically irrational?. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 30(2), 133-146.

Horsham, S., & Chung, M. C. (2013). Investigation of the relationship between trauma and pain catastrophising: The roles of emotional processing and altered self-capacity. Psychiatry Research, 208(3), 274-284.

Langland-Hassan, P. (2016). On choosing what to imagine. In Kind, A and Kung, P (eds) Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford University Press. 61-84.

Langland-Hassan, P. (2025). Explaining Imagination. Oxford University Press.

Leung, P. W., & Wong, M. M. (1998). Can cognitive distortions differentiate between internalising and externalising problems?. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 39(2), 263-269.

Kind, A. (2016). Imagining under constraints. In Kind, A and Kung, P (eds) Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford University Press. 145-159.

Kind, A., & Kung, P. (2016). Introduction: The puzzle of imaginative use. In Kind, A and Kung, P (eds) Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford University Press. 1-37

Meeten, F., Dash, S. R., Scarlet, A. L. S., & Davey, G. C. L. (2012). Investigating the effect of intolerance of uncertainty on catastrophic worrying and mood. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 50(11), 690-698.

Morrison, D. (Ed.). (1992). The Spaceguard survey: report of the NASA international near-Earth-object detection workshop (Vol. 107979). NASA.

Munton, J. (2025). Priority and prejudice: The Epistemology of Salience and Attention. Oxford University Press.

Roepke, A. M., & Seligman, M. E. (2016). Depression and prospection. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 55(1), 23-48.

Startup, H. M., & Davey, G. C. L. (2003). Inflated responsibility and the use of stop rules for catastrophic worrying. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 41(4), 495-503.

Torem, M. S. (2024). Future focused strategies in treating depression. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 66(2), 108-124.

Webster, F., Connoy, L., Longo, R., Ahuja, D., Amtmann, D., Anderson, A.,… Darnall, B. D. (2023). Patient responses to the term pain catastrophizing: thematic analysis of cross-sectional international data. The Journal of Pain, 24(2), 356-367.

Yurica, C. L., & DiTomasso, R. A. (2005). Cognitive distortions. In Freeman, A., Felgoise, S.H., Nezu, C.M., Nezu, A.M., Reinecke, M.A. (eds), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Springer. 117-122

A post by Nick Wiltsher

Sometimes, you succeed at imagining. Sometimes, you don’t. How do you, we, or anyone work out whether or not you’ve succeeded?

Here’s a simple answer: establish what you were trying to do, and then see if you managed it. This, I think, is basically right, but also less simple than it seems. I’m here going to ramble through some of the complications, with no particular argumentative direction.

Talk of “what you were trying to do” implies that imagining is an intentional action, which in turn suggests that we’re after a description of what action you were intending to perform in imagining.[1] But this formulation is ambiguous, at least once a little bit of dogma has been digested, and both of the disambiguated formulations have surprising aspects.

Suppose I want to do some dancing. But, being a traditional soul, I don’t just want to flail around in a vaguely rhythmical fashion. I want, specifically, to dance the Gay Gordons (let’s assume the willing partner is present). What determines whether I succeed in doing so?

Some of the determinants are, as it were, internal. I decide what dance I want to do; I have some control over what my limbs are doing and when they’re doing it. But some of the determinants are external. If whatever my limbs are up to doesn’t conform closely enough to the standard steps: well, in that case, whatever my partner and I are doing just isn’t the Gay Gordons. (interesting: if I fail, we both fail?)

As with dancing, so with imagining; except, I say, more so (and here’s the dogma). You can be dancing, but doing no particular dance. If you’re imagining, however, you’re always doing some particular imaginative thing, such as fantasising, creating, empathising, or fictionalising. In a slogan: no imagining in the abstract.

So when we ask what you’re trying to do when imagining, we need to inquire not only about the things you’re intending to imagine, but also about the kind of imagining you’re intending to do; and we need to take both into account when we ask whether you succeeded.

Something like this distinction is discernible in some recent-ish work on “imaginative projects”. So far as I can tell, Bernard Williams was the first person to use this term (1966, p. 36ff). He suggests that the question of what you’re imagining is settled by what things you’re intending to imagine, your imaginative project, rather than by the contents of your imagining alone (at least sometimes, at least in part). If I imagine myself dancing the Dundee Whaler, I could be imagining myself doing that very dance, or I could be imagining myself doing some line dancing, and I could do either thing with the very same contents. It’s the project, not the contents, that say which I’m doing.

Now, part of Williams’ point is that, if I’m intending to imagine doing some line dancing and I try to do it by imagining dancing the Dundee Whaler, I’ve done a bad job of fulfilling my intention. Projects provide normative structure to imaginings, because they have goals, and so we can ask whether the goal has been reached.

Since Williams introduced the term, some people have more or less followed him in using “imaginative project” to just mean “what things you’re intending to imagine”. But others have used the term to also refer to the kind of imagining you’re engaged with, such as Dorsch (2012, 2015) and Goldwasser (2024a, 2024b).

The principal reason why kinds of imagining end up being invoked is that they make a descriptive and normative difference to your imagining. Suppose you imagine dancing Roaring Jelly. You could, in so doing, be fantasising, or engaging in imaginative rehearsal, or perhaps in some other imaginative activity; and we can’t say which you’re doing just by describing the manifest contents of your imagining. Further, if you’re fantasising about dancing Davy Nick Nack, it doesn’t really matter that much whether your imagining is especially accurate. But if you’re trying to imaginatively rehearse dancing the Lady Wynd, it really matters that the promenade starts just as the ninth bar begins.

All this suggest that we need to look at both your intentions and the kind of imagining you were intending to do in order to work out whether you succeeded in your imagining. I’m now going to say something I find interesting, and perhaps surprising, about each of imaginative intentions and kinds of imagining.

On the subject of imaginative intentions: the way in which we often talk about our intentions might lead us to assume a misleading default account of how imagining goes. On that account, there’s at least a logical separation between intention and action, if not a temporal one. I first form an intention to fantasise about dancing the Montgomeries’ Rant; I then try to imagine myself doing it; I then, optionally, assess whether my imagining matched the intention with which I started.

The main reason to think this is misleading derives from work on artistic creation. As R. G. Collingwood (1938) argues, genuine creation involves working out what you’re doing as you go; if you have a detailed plan of where you’re going before you start, you might be doing something worthwhile, but it isn’t creation. Of course, you need some idea of what you’re up to, but you can’t formulate a replete intention to produce precisely that. Since we should want our accounts of imagination and imaginative intentions to encompass artistic creation, it would be a serious problem if those accounts were to embed a misleading description of a basic aspect of creation.

Of course, you might just think that the open-ended nature of the motivating intentions is an oddity of creation, and not something that ought to be a component of an account of imagination generally. But if you think about it, a similar open-endedness is, or ought to be, an aspect of accounts of many other kinds of imagining. Anyone invested in the idea that imagination has epistemic uses ought to accept this claim. If you can fully formulate the relevant intention to imagine something before imagining it, it’s mysterious what you actually learn by then doing the imagining.

The slightly surprising thing here is that the role of intentions in determining imaginative success, or in constituting imaginative projects, might be rather less prominent than initially supposed. As Rohrbaugh (2017) argues with respect to artistic plans, we may have to keep the notion of imaginative intention loose and abstract in order to accommodate the right cases, and this might mean that the notion can do little substantial work on its own. Projects are complicated things.

On the subject of kinds of imagining: I really think these are action-types analogous to dances: that is, action-types whose shape is socially determined. For dances, whether you count as doing the action depends at least partially on whether your behaviour (broadly construed) conforms to the pattern of behaviour that a relevant group takes to be constitutive of the action-type. The Royal Scottish Country Dance Society gets to say whether or not you’re dancing the Posties’ Jig.

Likewise, kinds of imagining are socially-determined action-types. What it is to imagine is to engage in (mostly) mental activity that is fundamental to and shaped by some particular human practice, such as art-making, story-telling, empathising. It’s impossible to say what imagining is without reference to some such practices, and impossible to characterise the practices without some reference to imagining. (Awkward question: what is the practice to which fantasising is related?)

For each such practice, we have an action-type: a specification of what you have to do in order to count as doing that kind of imagining. Depending on the practice, this might tell us what end is being pursued, what value is meant to accrue in its pursuit, what means should be used to pursue it. This is where the external conditions on imaginative projects come from: we assess the success of imaginings in part by their conformity to the norms of the relevant action-type.

Is this surprising? I suppose it depends on how surprised you are to hear that whether you succeed in imagining isn’t just settled by what’s going on in your head. I’m not especially surprised by that, but then I’m quite deep down a rabbit-hole that I’ve dug for myself. Do let me know whether you’re surprised.

* * *

Thanks to participants at the recent workshop in Bristol on imagining well for enduring the first pass of these thoughts and being very nice about it.

Notes

[1] It also suggests that we’re not after an analysis of the direction(s) of fit of imaginative mental states, as critically discussed by Langland-Hassan (2015); and it also suggests we’re not after a description of an “infrastructure” of “quasi-doxastic” states representing a fictional world, as elaborated by Chasid (e.g. 2019, 2021a, 2021b). It could be that one or both of these things is compatible with the ideas pursued in the main text, but neither is an auspicious starting point for pursuit. 

References

Collingwood, R. G. (1938). The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Chasid, Alon (2019). “Imagining in Response to Fiction: Unpacking the Infrastructure”.  Philosophical Explorations 23.1, pp. 31–48.

— (2021a). “Belief-Like Imagining and Correctness”.  American Philosophical Quarterly 58.2, pp. 147–160.

— (2021b). “Not by Imaginings Alone: On How Imaginary Worlds Are Established”.  Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7.2, pp. 195–212.

Dorsch, Fabian (2012). The Unity of Imagining. Frankfurt: Ontos.

— (2015). “Focused Daydreaming and Mind-Wandering”.  Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6.4, pp. 791–813.

Langland-Hassan, Peter (2015). Imaginative Attitudes. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (3):664-686.

Goldwasser, Seth (2024a). “Imagining as a Skillful Mental Action”.  Synthese 204.38, pp. 1–33.

— (2024b). “Remembering is an Imaginative Project”.  Philosophical Studies 181, pp. 2897–2933.

Rohrbaugh, Guy (2017). Psychologism and Completeness in the Arts. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75.2, pp. 131–141.

Williams, Bernard (1966). “Imagination and the Self ”. In his Problems of the Self (1973). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 26–45.

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.