Table Of ContentEpistemic Uses of Imagination
“This is a stunning and original collection of essays on imagination. It
will advance discussions in epistemology, aesthetics, metaphysics, phi-
losophy of mind, and even philosophy of science.”
– Neil Van Leeuwen, Georgia State University, USA
This book explores a topic that has recently become the subject of in-
creased 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 capac-
ity 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 jus-
tifcation, 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 ad-
vanced students who are working on imagination, as well as those work-
ing more broadly in epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind.
Christopher Badura is a PhD student in philosophy at the Ruhr Univer-
sity Bochum, Germany, working on logics of imagination. His research
interest is philosophical logic and its application to philosophical issues
concerning imagination.
Amy Kind is Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont
McKenna College, where she also serves as Director of the Gould Cen-
ter for Humanistic Studies. In addition to authoring the introductory
textbooks Persons and Personal Identity and Philosophy of Mind: The
Basics, she has edited Philosophy of Mind in the 20th and 21th Centu-
ries, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, and (with
Peter Kung) Knowledge Through Imagination.
Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
Extimate Technology
Self-Formation in a Technological World
Ciano Aydin
Modes of Truth
The Unifed Approach to Truth, Modality, and Paradox
Edited by Carlo Nicolai and Johannes Stern
Practices of Reason
Fusing the Inferentialist and Scientifc Image
Ladislav Koreň
Social Trust
Edited by Kevin Vallier and Michael Weber
Green Leviathan or the Poetics of Political Liberty
Navigating Freedom in the Age of Climate Change and
Artifcial Intelligence
Mark Coeckelbergh
The Social Institution of Discursive Norms
Historical, Naturalistic, and Pragmatic Perspectives
Edited by Leo Townsend, Preston Stovall, and Hans Bernard Schmid
Epistemic Uses of Imagination
Edited by Christopher Badura and Amy Kind
Political Philosophy from an Intercultural Perspective
Power Relations in a Global World
Edited by Blanca Boteva-Richter, Sarhan Dhouib, and James Garrison
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.
com/Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720
Epistemic Uses of Imagination
Edited by
Christopher Badura and
Amy Kind
First published 2021
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Contents
Introduction: The Epistemic Role of Imagination 1
CHRISTOPHER BADURA AND AMY KIND
SECTION I
Modality and Modal Knowledge 21
1 Why We Need Something Like Imagery 23
PETER KUNG
2 An Imaginative Person’s Guide to Objective Modality 44
DEREK LAM
3 Crossing Rivers: Imagination and Real Possibilities 63
REBECCA HANRAHAN
4 Imagination, Metaphysical Modality, and Modal Psychology 79
MICHAEL OMOGE
SECTION II
Reasoning 101
5 Reasoning with Imagination 103
JOSHUA MYERS
6 Equivalence in Imagination 122
FRANCESCO BERTO
7 How Imagination Can Justify 141
CHRISTOPHER BADURA
vi Contents
8 Imagination, Inference, and Apriority 160
ANTONELLA MALLOZZI
SECTION III
Thought Experiments 181
9 Narratives and Thought Experiments: Restoring the Role
of Imagination 183
MARGHERITA ARCANGELI
10 Two Ways of Imagining Galileo’s Experiment 202
MARGOT STROHMINGER
11 Attention to Details: Imagination, Attention, and
Epistemic Significance 218
ERIC PETERSON
SECTION IV
Understanding Self and Others 235
12 Bridging the Divide: Imagining Across Experiential
Perspectives 237
AMY KIND
13 On Imagining Being Someone Else 260
JULIA LANGKAU
14 “Imagine If They Did That to You!”: The Complexity of
Empathy 279
LUKE ROELOFS
15 Imagination, Selves, and Knowledge of Self: Pessoa’s
Dreams in The Book of Disquiet 298
NICK WILTSHER AND BENCE NANAY
Notes on Contributors 319
Index 323
Introduction
The Epistemic Role of Imagination
Christopher Badura and Amy Kind
Oftentimes imagination is used for fanciful purposes, from games of
pretense to daydreams to fantasies. Playful children imagine that the
foor between the couches is covered with hot lava, angry teenagers
imagine storming out of the house and escaping the tyranny of their
parents, and overworked adults imagine themselves drinking moji-
tos on the beach as a respite from the tedium of their daily lives. But
other times imagination is used for more down-to-earth purposes. It is
employed in efforts to predict and explain other people’s behavior, in
decision-making contexts, and planning for the future. As a lovestruck
teen, one might imagine how a particular conversational salvo will go
over with a prospective love interest; years later, that former teenager
might draw on imagination in an effort to fgure out how best to ma-
nipulate a big couch they’ve just purchased so it will ft through the
doorway to their frst apartment.
This volume focuses on these latter uses of imagination, what we here
refer to as epistemic uses of imagination.1 Philosophical interest in the
epistemic usefulness of imagination has recently blossomed.2 Although
there are a number of philosophers who remain skeptical, the claim that
imagination has an important role to play in the epistemic domain now
enjoys considerable support.3 How best to articulate that role and what
explains the ability of imagination to play it remain largely open ques-
tions, however. It is these kinds of questions that are explored in this
volume.
We have chosen to organize the volume by epistemic context. The
ffteen chapters have been divided into four sections, each of which fo-
cuses on a particular context in which imagination seems to have epis-
temic usefulness: modality and modal knowledge, reasoning, thought
experiments, and understanding self and others. However, in this intro-
duction, we provide a general discussion of three themes that unite the
chapters across sections. The frst part focuses on the themes themselves;
the second part focuses on the individual chapters in more detail and, in
doing so, aims to highlight how they pick up these various themes.
2 Christopher Badura and Amy Kind
I.1 Key Themes
One notion that has featured prominently in recent discussions of imag-
ination’s epistemic usefulness is that of constraint. It is generally agreed
that imagination must be in some way constrained in order to be epis-
temically useful.
Here it may be helpful to compare perception. Perception is, by its na-
ture, world-sensitive. It tracks changes in the world. Changes to an ob-
ject that one is seeing will cause changes to one’s perceptions of it. One
way to describe this world-sensitivity would be in terms of constraint:
perception is, by its nature, constrained by the world. And it’s precisely
in virtue of this constraint that perception is epistemically useful.
In contrast, imagination is not world-sensitive. An act of imagining
typically fails to track changes in the worldly objects with which it is
concerned and can diverge dramatically from the actual facts about
them. It’s this lack of world-sensitivity that, traditionally, led many phi-
losophers to dismiss imagination as epistemically irrelevant.4 But many
recent discussions have suggested that imaginings can be, and often are,
governed by constraints – even if these constraints are not provided by
the world in the same way as they are in the case of perception. It’s pre-
cisely in virtue of these constraints – some architectural and some set by
the imaginer – that imaginings can be epistemically useful.5
Imaginative projects typically start from some initial content that then
unfolds to some further content. Although sometimes the unfolding pro-
cess happens almost automatically, in many cases the imaginer takes
active control of the process (see Langland-Hassan (2016) for discus-
sion). In epistemic uses of imagination, constraints need to be operative
at both stages of this process. The initial content must be appropriately
constrained and the unfolding process also needs to be appropriately
constrained. Throughout this volume, authors attend to these issues –
some focusing on constraints of the frst sort, some on constraints of the
second sort, and some on both.
We see particular attention to the unfolding process in most of the
chapters in Section II of the volume, a section dedicated to issues con-
cerning reasoning. For example, although there is widespread agreement
that unfolding must be constrained by logic in order for an imagining
to be epistemically useful, there are questions about how the logic of
imagination should best be specifed – questions that are addressed in
the contribution by Franz Berto (Chapter 6). In contrast, there is a focus
on the constraints governing the initial content in most of the chapters
in Section IV of the volume – the section dedicated to issues concerning
knowledge of self and others. For example, in focusing on how exactly
we should understand perspective-taking, both Julia Langkau (Chap-
ter 13) and Luke Roelofs (Chapter 14) address issues relating to how
we should specify the kind of imaginative endeavor in which we are
Introduction 3
engaged. Nick Wiltsher and Bence Nanay (Chapter 15) discuss the way
that one’s reality constrains what imaginative projects are available to
one. In other sections of the volume, Peter Kung’s discussion of the im-
portance of mental imagery for the epistemology of modality (Chapter 1)
and Margot Strohminger’s discussion of how we can best understand
Galileo’s thought experiment (Chapter 10) also take up issues related to
the constraints that must be in place in setting the initial content of one’s
imaginative project.
The better one is at setting appropriate constraints on one’s imagina-
tion, the more likely one is to succeed in putting imagination to epistemic
use. This fact brings us to a second theme that runs throughout the vol-
ume, namely that imagination is best thought of within a framework that
treats it as a skill. Constraint-setting and obeying constraints are activi-
ties that one can be better or worse at, and imagining is correspondingly
an activity that one can be better or worse at. This feature – that is, the
fact that people differ with respect to how good they are at it – is one of
the paradigmatic features of activities that are skills. Drawing upon an
analysis recently offered by Amy Kind, we can say that skills are natu-
rally thought of as activities that can be done more or less well, that are
under one’s intentional control, and that can be improved via practice
and training – all features that are shared by imagining (Kind, 2020a).
The skill associated with epistemic uses of imagination may well be
different from the skill associated with more fantastical uses of imagina-
tion. When we imagine in contexts of daydreaming or make-believe, for
example, we are using imagination to move beyond the world in which
we live. But when we imagine in contexts of thought experimentation,
mindreading, and the epistemology of modality, we are typically trying
to learn something about the world in which we live. Someone who is
very skilled at imagination in the more fantastical contexts is good at
unshackling their imagination and letting it roam free of reality, dis-
connecting from it. Someone who is very skilled at imagination in the
epistemic contexts is good at tethering their imagination to reality in
just the right way that they can learn from it. This again highlights the
connection between the frst theme and this second one. With respect to
fantastical uses of imagination, skill relies on the removal of constraints,
and often these constraints are ones that other imaginers assume with-
out question. With respect to epistemic uses of imagination, skill relies
on the imposition of constraints, and often these constraints are ones
that escape the attention of other imaginers.
While the frst theme we discussed – that relating to constraints – is
explicitly taken up in many of the chapters of the volume, this second
theme is often more implicit. But there are several places where it comes
to the forefront. Consider Amy Kind’s discussion (Chapter 12) about
bridging epistemic divides. When it comes to the question of whether
an imaginer can have epistemic access to experiential perspectives other
