A post by Uku Tooming, Roomet Jakapi, Riin Sirkel, and Toomas Lott

We recently received a grant from the Estonian Research Council for a five-year research project titled “Imagination in Cognition: Contemporary and Ancient Perspectives.” Our team consists of four members: Uku Tooming and Roomet Jakapi specialize in contemporary approaches to imagination and related phenomena, while Riin Sirkel and Toomas Lott are experts in Ancient Greek philosophy, Uku Tooming is the primary investigator of the project.

In this blog post, we will provide a brief overview of our main research questions and the way in which we plan to approach them.

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Piotr Kozak’s recent book: Thinking in Images: Imagistic Cognition and Non-propositional Content. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Piotr Kozak. Commentaries follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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Thinking in Images is a rich and elaborate book that defends a view that images play an indispensable role in thinking as measurement devices. In articulating that view, Kozak covers a lot of ground by critically engaging with a wide range of literature and carving out new paths in the theoretical landscape.

Inevitably, this short commentary cannot to justice to the wealth of detail in Kozak’s book. For instance, the reader can find there a fascinating discussion of the representational role of knot diagrams and black hole pictures. The book also presents an innovative account of recognition-based identification in terms of construction invariants. These are just a couple of examples of what the book offers but that I don’t have space to discuss here.

A post by Uku Tooming

According to sentimental perceptualism (or emotional perceptualism), affective experience is a basic source of knowledge about normative and evaluative matters, like perceptual experience is the basic source of knowledge about descriptive matters (see Milona & Naar 2020; Tappolet 2016). One way to cash this out is in terms of justification: affective experiences about X (where X is some scenario or situation) can immediately (but defeasibly) justify evaluative judgments about X, like perceptual experiences can immediately (but defeasibly) justify descriptive judgments.

For the perceptual analogy to hold promise, it should be substantive enough to make it plausible that affect is a fitting candidate for being basic source of justification in the same way as perception is. In particular, there should be epistemically significant common features that are shared both by perception and affective experience.

A post by Uku Tooming

The following lines are from John Cale’s song “Paris 1919”:

Efficiency efficiency they say

Get to know the date and tell the time of day

As the crowds begin complaining

How the Beaujolais is raining

Down on the darkened meetings of Champs Élysées

The album with the same title, described by Cale as “an example of the nicest ways of saying something ugly” is full of wonderfully impressionistic imagery, centered on the theme of Europe around World War I. One (presumably unintended) effect that this album has on me is a rather intense pleasure when thinking of the last two lines in the excerpt. The imagery of experiencing Beaujolais (which I rarely drink) falling down on me on the streets of Paris (where I have never been) is surprisingly enjoyable.

However, when I start to think more closely about the imagined situation, then a complication arises. I quickly come to realize that if I actually were to experience wine raining on me, the overall experience would not be that wonderful, given that my clothes would get soaked in wine, which is far from pleasant. By trying to imagine the scenario more accurately, I come to enjoy it far less. Only by avoiding this, I can reap the maximal hedonic reward. This might be an idiosyncratic response on my part, but I am sure that many people delight in some imagery that upon further scrutiny wouldn’t be so pleasing.

A post by Uku Tooming.

It is intuitive to think that grasping the aesthetic value of something – be it an artefact or a natural object – requires first-hand experience. For instance, it seems problematic to say: “That painting is beautiful, although I have not seen it”. This idea has found its formulation in the so-called Acquaintance Principle (AP). Take an influential statement of the principle by Richard Wollheim:

judgements of aesthetic value, unlike judgements of moral knowledge, must be based on first-hand experience of their objects and are not, except within very narrow limits, transmissible from one person to another. (Wollheim 1980, 233)

Both the content and status of AP are under debate. It may be treated as an epistemic principle concerning aesthetic knowledge or justification, or a non-epistemic principle concerning the acceptable way of making aesthetic judgments. In the context of this blog post, I try to avoid these intricacies and focus on the general idea that first-hand experience of an object is necessary for aesthetic appreciation.

A post by Uku Tooming.

There is a conception of desire, call it the Guise of the Good view (GG), according to which having a desire involves representing its content as good or valuable. For instance, when I want to eat ice cream, I treat the prospect of eating ice cream as good in some sense. I here identify the content of desire with its satisfaction condition and take the latter to be a state of affairs which would obtain when the desire were satisfied. GG can then be rephrased as a caim that having a desire involves representing its satisfaction as good. This view has a respectable philosophical ancestry, going back at least to Plato, and it still has its proponents today.