A post by Nick Wiltsher

Here are three related claims to which I’m increasingly sympathetic:

(1) Imagination has no distinctive epistemic ends.

(2) The epistemic ends that can be pursued using imagination are better achieved by other means.

(3) There is, all the same, value in using imagination to pursue (some) epistemic ends.

Claim (3) only matters if claims (1) and (2) stand up. So let’s see if they do.

A post by Nicholas Wiltsher

I’ve long been fascinated by Afrofuturism, without ever being quite sure what it actually is. Wikipedia rather unhelpfully says that it’s “a cultural aesthetic … an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation … a way of imagining … [a] genre”.[i] That’s a confused tangle of categories, and I’m not bothered about unravelling it. I’m just going to pull out a couple of threads and loosely weave them with some thoughts stolen from Michel-Antoine Xhignesse, with the aim of saying something about collective imaginaries.

This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Peter Langland-Hassan’s recent book Explaining Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2020). The book is available as an Open Access download. See here for an introduction from Peter. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.

One way in which a philosophy book can be brilliant is by presenting claims, positions, and arguments with which you agree entirely, and yet deriving from them a view with which you feel you somehow disagree. By this criterion (and by many others), Peter Langland-Hassan’s book is brilliant. The pleasure and the puzzle lie in trying to work out just what it is that’s bugging you. I’m not sure that I’ve cracked the puzzle yet, so I’m going to indulge in some thinking out loud, and invite Langland-Hassan to help me straighten it out.

A post by Nick Wiltsher.

I had a great plan for this blog-post. See, I was meant to speak at a disaster studies conference last week. Disaster studies, it turns out, is a firmly established field, combining hard-headed analysis of actual disasters and their mitigation with speculative fictionalizing about possible disasters and dystopias. They wanted a philosopher to come talk about imagination, disasters of the future, and the future of disasters; I was local, cheap, and available. I was going to gather and share with you all some observations of how imagination figures in the thinking of disaster studiers, and make some comparisons with how we here think of imagination. “Field notes from the interdisciplinary wilds”. Something like that. Writes itself, practically.

Unfortunately, the disaster studies conference was cancelled. You can write your own punchline. And so there I was, devoid of field notes, socially isolated, inspirationally bereft, and yet dedicated to the provision of imagination content. Take all that as an apology for the state of what follows.

…So here’s an observation: based on a tiny, unrepresentative sample, I can confidently say that the way in which imagination is thought of in a range of broadly humanistic disciplines is pretty different from the way imagination is thought of in philosophy—both in terms of what imagination does, and what imagination is. Following the observation, here’s a question: what might explain this difference? I now present a range of cursory attempts at an answer.

A post by Nick Wiltsher.

Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to deprecate faculty psychology, by which I mean the tidy division of mental states into a small number of faculties, each typified by a certain power, and the description and explanation of aspects of the mental in terms of the expression and interaction of those powers. (Many such philosophers find the tidy division of mental states into a large number of modules, each typified by a certain function, and the explanation of aspects of the mental in terms of the interaction of those functions, much more edifying.) In some domains, faculty talk nonetheless enjoys some kind of afterlife. Most obviously, perception is often discussed as if some states share a certain essential capacity, and thus form a small and exclusive club. In other domains, however, the faculty is dead. When it comes to imagination, few philosophers seem keen, even implicitly, to suppose that the motley selection of acts commonly called “imaginative” are united as a kind by some common power. One might wonder what’s lost by abandoning this way of thinking, but here I just want to ask the ostensibly simpler question of who killed the imaginative faculty.