The epistemic imagination revisited

Abstract

Recently, various philosophers have argued that we can obtain knowledge via the imagination. In particular, it has been suggested that we can come to know concrete, empirical matters of everyday significance by appropriately imagining relevant scenarios. Arguments for this thesis come in two main varieties: black box reliability arguments and constraints‐based arguments. We suggest that both strategies are unsuccessful. Against black‐box arguments, we point to evidence from empirical psychology, question a central case‐study, and raise concerns about a (claimed) evolutionary rationale for the imagination's reliability. Against the constraints‐based account, we argue that to the extent that it works, this does not give rise to knowledge that is distinctively from the imagination. We conclude by suggesting that the imagination's role in raising possibilities, traditionally seen as part of the context of discovery, can in fact play a role in justification, including as a bulwark against certain sorts of skepticism.

Imagination as a source of empirical justification

“…Proponents of this argument typically support the claim that imagination is unreliable by pointing to empirical results suggesting that the imagination is plagued by misleading biases, heuristics, and fallacies. Kinberg & Levy, 2023 argue that there are systematic errors in imaginative physical reasoning. For example, subjects incorrectly imagine that an object exiting a curved tube will follow a curved trajectory rather than a straight trajectory (McCloskey & Kohl, 1983), and that an object dropped from a moving body will follow a straight path downwards rather than a curved path .…”

“…Although these arguments each contain important insights, they also each have important philosophical and dialectical shortcomings. Kinberg & Levy, 2023 argue that they rely on speculative empirical claims (e.g. about the MYERS -5 of 12 evolutionary function or general reliability of the imagination) and tenuous analogies (e.g.…”

Emotions in scientific practice

“…Similarly, it has been proposed that scientific thought experiments are fictional narrative devices and their production and interaction with them requires imagination. 4 Recently, philosophers of science took considerable interest in identifying the epistemic roles of imagination in science and, by now, it is generally agreed that imagination, when constrained by logical coherence and representational accuracy, can be a source of learning (Kind and Kung 2016;Stuart 2017Stuart , 2019aStuart ,b, 2020aSalis and Frigg 2020;Levy and Godfrey-Smith 2019;Murphy 2020bMurphy , 2022Kinberg and Levy 2022).…”

“…Recently, philosophers of science took considerable interest in identifying the epistemic roles of imagination in science and, by now, it is generally agreed that imagination, when constrained by logical coherence and representational accuracy, can be a source of learning (Kind and Kung 2016; Stuart 2017, 2019a,b, 2020a; Salis and Frigg 2020; Levy and Godfrey-Smith 2019; Murphy 2020b, 2022; Kinberg and Levy 2022).…”

Sharpening the tools of imagination

“…However, the Waltonian account is not accepted by everyone. For example, Stacie Friend (2020) claims that what really does the epistemological work in the models-as-fictions view is the principles of generation, not the imagination (see also Kinberg and Levy 2022). In the present context, this is not to be lamented: even if we discard the Waltonian vocabulary of games of make-believe and props, the key point is that tools of imagination like models can be good in the sense that they employ a good set of constraints, which are good in the sense that they help to focus the imagination in a way that has good consequences.…”