A Note on the Epistemological Value of Pretense Imagination

Abstract

Pretense imagination is imagination understood as the ability to recreate rational belief revision. This kind of imagination is used in pretend-play, risk-assessment, etc. Some even claim that this kind of hypothetical belief revision can be grounds to justify new beliefs in conditionals, in particular conditionals that play a foundational role in the epistemology of modality. In this paper, I will argue that it cannot. I will first provide a very general theory of pretense imagination, which I formalise using tools from dynamic epistemic logic. As a result, we can clearly see that pretense imagination episodes are build up out of two kinds of imaginative stages, so I will present an argument by cases. This argument shows that pretense imagination might indeed provide us with justification for believing certain conditionals. Despite this, I will argue that these are not the kind of conditionals that allow pretense imagination to play a foundational role in the epistemology of modality.

Imagination as a source of empirical justification

“…Langland-Hassan (2016) and Williams (2021) flesh out this suggestion by arguing that there are algorithms that involuntarily determine how imaginings develop over time and that are sensitive to environmental regularities. In a similar vein, others have suggested that the imagination involuntarily develops according to logical principles that ensure its world-sensitivity (Badura, 2021;Berto, 2017Berto, , 2021Berto, , 2023Canavotto et al, 2020;Schoonen, 2021).…”