Epistemic Uses of Imagination

Christopher Badura, Amy Kind, Christopher Badura, Amy Kind

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000399066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

This book explores a topic that has recently become the subject of increased philosophical interest: how can imagination be put to epistemic use? Though imagination has long been invoked in contexts of modal knowledge, in recent years philosophers have begun to explore its capacity to play an epistemic role in a variety of other contexts as well.

In this collection, the contributors address an assortment of issues relating to epistemic uses of imagination, and in particular, they take up the ways in which our imaginings must be constrained so as to justify beliefs and give rise to knowledge. These constraints are explored across several different contexts in which imagination is appealed to for justification, namely reasoning, modality and modal knowledge, thought experiments, and knowledge of self and others. Taken as a whole, the contributions in this volume break new ground in explicating when and how imagination can be epistemically useful.

Epistemic Uses of Imagination will be of interest to scholars and advanced students who are working on imagination, as well as those working more broadly in epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind.

Chapters 6 and 12 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.

• Abelson, Robert 8
• absolute possibility 92
• access role in attention 221, 223–24, 229
• acknowledged propositions 147–49
• act of imagination 2, 9, 16, 310, 314
• actual possibilities 67
• actual world 26–27, 33–37, 74, 91, 104–5, 119n8, 280, 292
• Adjunction in imagining 131–32, 135, 137
• adjustment distinction 282, 283
• admissibility vs. inadmissibility 49–50
• aesthetic experience 311
• affordances of environment 72
• Alchemy of Race and Rights, The (Williams) 248
• alignment in perception 40
• alleged imaginings 54
• all-or-nothing knowledge 249
• alter egos 298, 299
• antecedent belief 144, 152, 156n3
• ‘Anti-Empathy’ (Goldie) 260–61
• anti-essentialist concerns 52–54, 307
• anti-exceptionalism 160, 169, 175
• antiracism 279–80
• anti-realism 81
• appeal to evidence 58
• a priori/a posteriori distinction: cognitive architecture of simulation 168–70
  • in conceptual possibility 25–31
  • Generality Claim 164, 170–73
  • Imagination Claim 164, 165–70
  • imagination vs. inference 173–78
  • introduction to 4, 11–12, 160–61
  • sensory ima...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Epistemic Role of Imagination
• Section I Modality and Modal Knowledge
• Section II Reasoning
• Section III Thought Experiments
• Section IV Understanding Self and Others
• Notes on Contributors
• Index