Knowledge Through Imagination

✍ Scribed by Amy Kind (editor), Peter Kung (editor)

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 261
• Edition: Illustrated
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Imagination is celebrated as our vehicle for escape from the mundane here and now. It transports us to distant lands of magic and make-believe. It provides us with diversions during boring meetings or long bus rides. It enables creation of new things that the world has never seen. Yet the focus on imagination as a means of escape from the real world minimizes the fact that imagination seems also to furnish us with knowledge about it. Imagination seems an essential component in our endeavor to learn about the world in which we live―whether we're planning for the future, aiming to understand other people, or figuring out whether two puzzle pieces fit together. But how can the same mental power that allows us to escape the world as it currently is also inform us about the world as it currently is? The ten original essays in Knowledge Through Imagination, along with a substantial introduction by the editors, grapple with this neglected question; in doing so, they present a diverse array of positions ranging from cautious optimism to deep-seated pessimism. Many of the essays proceed by considering specific domains of inquiry where imagination is often employed―from the navigation of our immediate environment, to the prediction of our own and other peoples' behavior, to the investigation of ethical truth. Other essays assess the prospects for knowledge through imagination from a more general perspective, looking at issues of cognitive architecture and basic rationality. Blending perspectives from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, Knowledge Through Imagination sheds new light on the epistemic role of imagination.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction: The Puzzle of Imaginative Use
Part One: Taxonomical and Architectural Approaches
1. On the Epistemic Value of Imagining, Supposing, and Conceiving
2. On Choosing What to Imagine
3. The Imaginative Agent
Part Two: Optimistic Approaches
4. Knowing by Imagining
5. Modals and Modal Epistemology
6. Imagining Under Constraints
7. Perceiving People as People: An Overlooked Role for the Imagination
Part Three: Skeptical Approaches
8. Knowing Me, Knowing You: Failure to Forecast and the Empathic
Imagination
9. Imagination Through Knowledge
10. Thought Experiments in Ethics
Index