How Imagination Informs

被引:3
作者
Myers, Joshua [1 ]
机构
[1] Univ Barcelona, Dept Philosophy, LOGOS, Barcelona, Spain
关键词
imagination; mental imagery; analog representation; representational format; epistemic justification; epistemology of imagination; RETINOTOPIC ORGANIZATION; MENTAL-IMAGERY; ANALOG;
D O I
10.1093/pq/pqad118
中图分类号
B [哲学、宗教];
学科分类号
01 ; 0101 ;
摘要
An influential objection to the epistemic power of the imagination holds that it is uninformative. You cannot get more out of the imagination than you put into it, and therefore learning from the imagination is impossible. This paper argues, against this view, that the imagination is robustly informative. Moreover, it defends a novel account of how the imagination informs, according to which the imagination is informative in virtue of its analog representational format. The core idea is that analog representations represent relations 'for free', and this explains how the imagination can contain more information than is put into it. This account makes important contributions to both philosophy of mind, by showing how the imagination can generate new content that is not represented by a subject's antecedent mental states, and epistemology, by showing how the imagination can generate new justification that is not conferred by a subject's antecedent evidence.
引用
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页码:167 / 189
页数:23
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