This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Rob Hopkins’ recent book: The Profile of Imagining (Oxford University Press, 2024). On Monday, we began with an introduction from Rob. Commentaries and replies are running Tuesday through Thursday.

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Commentary from Joshua Myers

In this clear, thoughtful, and sharply written book, Hopkins presents a comprehensive account of the nature, content, and phenomenology of sensory imagining that is inspired by Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Ryle.

One of the core claims of this account is that, unlike what we perceive, what we imagine cannot overflow our awareness and is therefore not amenable to observation. Consider what it is like to perceive an apple. The apple seems to have a nature that is open to investigation. For example, you might be surprised to turn the apple around and find a bruise on the other side. The objects of perception overflow our awareness of them and, as a result, we can extend our awareness of them by observation. By contrast, when you imagine an apple, there is no aspect of the imagined apple that you are not aware of. If you imagine rotating the apple to reveal a bruise on the other side, then either you already imagined the bruise before rotating it, or you didn’t, in which case there was no pre-existing bruise to discover. Either way, you will not be surprised by the bruise. As a result, you cannot extend your awareness of imagined objects by observation.

A large portion of the book is dedicated to defending this contrast between perception and imagination. I will focus on just one thread which comes out in Chapter 7 while investigating how imagination can yield knowledge about the actual world.

A post by Josh Myers

Imaginings can justify empirical beliefs about the actual world. For example, you can get justification for believing that your suitcase will fit into the trunk of your car simply by imagining trying to fit your suitcase inside and finding that you imagine succeeding.

But not all imaginings are created epistemically equal. Consider two variations of this case:

(1) You imagine the suitcase fitting into the trunk clearly and vividly. Your imagining is intense, richly detailed, and precise. Although you do not mistake your imagining for perception, its sensory phenomenology is highly perception-like.

(2) You imagine the suitcase fitting into the trunk blurrily and faintly. Your imagining is weak, sparsely detailed, and imprecise. The sensory phenomenology of your imagining stands in stark contrast to the comparative vivacity of your perceptual phenomenology.

Intuitively, (1) confers more justification than (2). This motivates the view that imaginative vivacity can make a difference to the justificatory force of the imagination.[i] We can formulate this thesis as follows:

Vivacity: Imaginings with a greater degree of vivacity confer a greater degree of justification.

Vivacity has not been explicitly discussed in the literature on the epistemology of imagination. Nevertheless, I suspect that it is sometimes tacitly assumed. For example, Kind (2018) argues that imaginings can justify beliefs by appealing to extraordinarily skilled imaginers such as Nikola Tesla and Temple Grandin. I take it that at least part of the motivation for appealing to extraordinary imaginers is that their imaginings are extremely vivid and that this makes them good candidates for conferring justification.

In this blog post, I will argue that, despite its intuitive appeal, Vivacity is false. The vivacity of an imagining plays no role in determining its justificatory force.

A post by Joshua Myers.

Peter Medawar, in his “Advice to a Young Scientist,” writes that

every discovery, every enlargement of the understanding, begins as an imaginative preconception of what the truth might be. The imaginative preconception—a “hypothesis”—arises by a process as easy or as difficult to understand as any other creative act of mind; it is a brainwave, an inspired guess, a product of a blaze of insight. (Medawar 1979, p. 84)

Medawar gets things exactly right. The imagination plays a crucial role in hypothesis generation: to form a hypothesis is to imagine a way the world could be. Despite being highly intuitive, and despite many scientists, like Medawar, explicitly stating that they use their imagination to come up with hypotheses, this view has received surprisingly little philosophical attention.

In this blog, I’ll motivate the imaginative account of hypothesis generation, explicate some of the mechanisms by which the imagination plays this epistemic role, and briefly speculate about norms on hypothesis generation.