A post by Max Jones

I imagine that, if you’re reading this, you probably think the imagination is a good thing. If, like me, you find the imagination fascinating, you may have become fond of it over years of wondering about it, and may have been awed by the things that it can do.

I’ve recently been thinking a lot on Ryle’s “Thought and Imagination” (1979, 51-64) (which may account for the somewhat arcane style that I’ve decided to write this in, channelling an imagined hybrid of myself and Ryle!). Thinking about Ryle’s posthumously published work on imagination has made me begin to worry about the apparent goodness of imagination. I worry that we may have been missing something in failing to see that the imagination is often considered to be a good thing in and of itself.

Why is it good to use your imagination? There are obviously lots of benefits that can come from using one’s imagination, but we often talk as though there is something intrinsically good about using one’s imagination and perhaps even about imagination itself.

This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Epistemic Uses of Imagination, a recently published volume edited by Chris Badura and Amy Kind (Routledge 2021). See here for an introduction from Chris and Amy. Commentaries will appear Tuesday through Friday.

A post by Max Jones.

The Predictive Processing framework (PP) has become increasingly influential in recent years, with some claiming that it provides a grand-unifying theory of mental function, explaining perception, action and all cognitive processes in between (Clark 2015; Hohwy 2013). Some proponents of PP have claimed that it is particularly well-placed to explain imagination (Clark 2015 ch. 3; Kirchhoff 2018). This optimism is partly based on the idea that imagination-like processes, where agents endogenously generate content, are somewhat ubiquitous, playing a role in our everyday interactions with the world through perception and action.