A post by Luke Roelofs

What is the relationship, if any, between gender and imagination? Of course one familiar point is that we often face interesting challenges in imagining across demographic and interpersonal difference, and gender difference are a prime example of that. But I’m interested in the thought that gender might be connected to imagination in a closer and more distinctive way.

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.

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Recentering Perspectives: Commentary from Luke Roelofs

The Space Between offers two much-needed things: a defence of empathy’s value and a reorientation of how we should analyse it. I won’t say too much about the defence: Maibom responds to critics of empathy both in philosophy and in the wider culture, making the case that empathy is a multi-faceted skill that often requires effort and care, but which provides a lot of valuable things when done well, some of which we can’t get elsewhere. In particular, empathy is not opposed to either rationality or impartiality, but is a key contributor to, even component of, both. On this score I’m in full agreement.

What I want to dwell on is the picture of empathy the book develops and deploys, which I think somewhat blurs or cross-cuts some common distinctions that philosophers use to analyse empathy. That’s not to say it’s idiosyncratic; the book’s picture is woven out of both everyday examples and empirical results, and left me suspecting that the picture of empathy given here matches pretty well how a lot of non-philosophers think of it.

A report by Luke Roelofs

Interdisciplinary conferences are often marked by a sort of fertile confusion. Nobody’s quite sure whether they’re talking about the same things, making the same assumptions, or pursuing the same interests, but the process of trying to figure that out can be very illuminating. The philosophy of imagination, as a sub-field, often involves a similar fertile confusion: philosophical raccoons clambering through the junkyard of the mind, trying to find, clean off, and exchange discarded fragments of ideas about fiction, modal epistemology, fantasy, thought-experiments, creativity, mindreading, and anything else that someone might describe in terms of ‘imagination’.

A post by Luke Roelofs

Imagining is often emotionally charged. And it often serves to represent emotions. In this post I’m interested in cases where it’s both: where an emotional state felt by the imaginer (what I’ll call the ‘imaginative emotion’) represents an emotion which the imaginer or someone else either will feel, did feel, is feeling, or would have felt (what I’ll call the ‘imagined emotion’).

For example, in trying to empathise with a friend’s difficult situation, I might imagine myself in their situation so as to simulate their feelings. In trying to predict someone’s decision, I might do the same with an eye to what actions the simulated emotion might lead to; and in trying to make a decision I might imagine myself experiencing the consequences of one choice or the other, and see how it makes me feel. These efforts at emotional imagining are fallible, especially in difficult circumstances, but they are nevertheless common, and often better than nothing (cf. some past posts here).

A post by Luke Roelofs.

In last week’s post, Peter Langland-Hassan presented an argument for revising the widely-accepted view that emotional responses to fiction are driven by imagination. Rather, he argues, they are driven by beliefs - beliefs about the content of the fiction.

Although I disagree with Peter, I hope he may find this post indirectly supportive, since in trying to resist his argument, I find potentially revisionary implications in the opposite direction: rather than belief taking over what we thought was imagination’s domain, imagination might spill into territory we thought belonged to belief.

A post by Luke Roelofs.

Can imagination make a difference to what you ought to think or do, even when you don’t imagine anything?

I’m assuming here that, as several philosophers have recently argued (e.g. Dorsch 2016, Williamson 2016, Kind 2016, 2018) properly-constrained imagination (meaning roughly ‘imagination that seeks to accurately match some part of reality) can have epistemically and practically significant results.

A post by Luke Roelofs.

In ‘The Heterogeneity of the Imagination’, Amy Kind argues that no single mental faculty can do all the work imagination has been assigned by philosophers. I can’t address every point Kind makes, but I’ll sketch a case for the homogeneity of the ‘imagination’ appealed to in the four contexts she focuses on.