A post by Michael Omoge

In his insightful review of the volume, Epistemic Uses of Imagination (2021), edited by Christopher Badura and Amy Kind, Tom Schoonen (2022) raised a problem for the view I defended in the volume. I’ll quote him at length:

Another issue with respect to the justification use of imagination is that it is not often explicitly considered whether it is really the imagination that is doing the epistemic heavily lifting, or whether it is something else that does […] We also see this in the contribution of Omoge. He extends Nichols and Stich’s notion of scripts to, what he calls, modalizing scripts. ‘For example, to imagine whether zombies are possible, the relevant modalizing script (call it, a zombie script) is that which details how thoughts involving “consciousness” typically unfold’ (p. 84). However, as Langland-Hassan (2012) points out, merely suggesting that there is a mechanism that fills in the details and labelling it ‘scripts’, ‘does little more than provide space for an explanation to come’ (p. 162, emphasis added). This is especially problematic for Omoge’s project of presenting an imagination-based epistemology of modality, for it is the scripts, which consist of theoretical knowledge, that are doing all the epistemological work, not the imagination (Schoonen 2022: 3, original italics).

For a bit of context, let’s begin with what scripts are. Scripts have a long history in cognitive psychology as components of beliefs, which guide both reasoning and acting. According to Schank & Abelson, “a script is a structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in a particular context” (1977: 41). Thus, there is a restaurant that details how events in a restaurant typically unfold. My view, as Schoonen correctly describes it, turns on extending this notion of ‘script’ to metaphysical modalizing, e.g., the phenomenal zombie. Schoonen’s problem with my view, however, is that by relying on scripts, it becomes unclear whether imagination is doing the required work. Perhaps scripts are doing the “epistemic heavy lifting”, and, so, it is unclear to what extent I’ve described an imagination-based epistemology of modality. In short, Schoonen is saying that “scripting is not imagining”. This contribution is a first attempt[i] at showing why scripting is imagining. My submission is that if Schoonen is correct, then we would have to forfeit what we mean by ‘imagination’.

A post by Michael Omoge.

Recently, imagination has been getting increased philosophical attention on account of its relevance in explaining a host of things, such as mindreading, creativity, autism, pretense, modal epistemology, and so on, and central to this attention, is the cognitive architecture of imagination. The thought is that understanding the cognitive architecture of imagination will illuminate the range of functions that have been attributed to imagination. Hence, Schellenberg notes, “gaining a better understanding of the cognitive architecture of imagination is of interest not just to philosophy of mind, but also to aesthetics and to modal epistemology” (2013: 498). Experts mostly agree, but with exceptions, that imagination has its own dedicated system, which constitutes this architecture. That is, according some experts, imagination has an internal structure, such that experiential and propositional imagination can be explained in terms of perceptual and language systems sending input into this internal structure, respectively. According to others, imagination doesn’t have any internal structure, in that experiential and propositional imagination come for free with our perceptual and linguistic capabilities, respectively.