A conference report by Serena Gregorio

It is a truism in our everyday thinking that interpersonal understanding is valuable. But what does it mean, exactly, to understand someone? This question drove the workshop “Can you imagine?!” The Role of Imagination in Understanding Others, held on September 26th and 27th, 2023 at the Justus Liebig Universität Giessen, as part of the DFG-funded research project Geist und Imagination. The guiding assumption was twofold: Understanding someone cannot be reduced to, nor exhaustively explained by, acquiring propositional knowledge of their mental states and rationalizing explanations of their actions in terms of causes. Simultaneously, the act of imaginatively re-enacting another person's perspective in a phenomenally rich way seems to be a promising approach to making sense of at least some cases of other-directed understanding. I’ll briefly summarize the talks by highlighting three main themes that emerged.