Online research in philosophy

Traditional philosophical uneasiness with imagining activity is documented. The reason adduced for the ontological homelessness of imagination is the inability of most philosophers to recognize the irreducible nature and function of imaginativity.Imagining is then distinguished from sense-perceiving. imaging. and conceptual activity. Imagining, it is proposed, is the reality of making-believe; and such human, as-if functioning can both (I) characterize human deeds as imaginative acts. and (2) be a latent or active functional moment within other kinds of human acts.Why God. creational ordinances, angels. and all earthly creatures can be imaginated is expounded, along with an analysis of such activity. its norm. and imaginative results huch as art). Remarks on relations of imagining to science and faith conclude the piece.

Most philosophers writing on the imagination have insisted that we cannot gain knowledge by relying on imagining – in contrast, say, to perception or inference – as our source of knowledge. Their doubts have not concerned the widely acknowledged fact that imagining a situation may help or enable us to acquire certain pieces of knowledge – for instance, when we visualise geometrical figures or patterns of numbers to come to know mathematical facts (cf. Giaquinto (1992) and (2007)), or when we engage in thought experiments or other imaginative projects to gain philosophical knowledge (cf. Gendler (2000), and Gendler & Hawthorne (2002)). Instead, what is traditionally rejected is the idea that mental episodes of imagining can ground or constitute knowledge in the same way in which episodes of perceiving, remembering or judging can do so.1..

Perky's famous experiments have been taken to show that at the limit perceiving and imagining (more precisely, seeing and visualising into seen space) do not differ phenomenologically. One way to block this result is to argue that the task Perky set her subjects raised the threshold for perception, so that they were not perceiving the stimuli she showed them. I argue that even if this strategy fails, Perky's cases cannot prove the conclusion folk have wanted to draw. She showed her subjects, not the objects they went on to visualise, but crude pictures of such things. What they confused with visualising into seen space was thus, not perceptual consciousness of stimuli, but pictorial consciousness. Once we're clear about the nature of the latter, we can see that Perky's results reveal nothing very surprising at all.

This is a longer version of a paper to appear in 'Analysis' (July 2012).

Perky's famous experiments have been taken to show that at the limit perceiving and imagining (more precisely, seeing and visualising into seen space) do not differ phenomenologically. One way to block this result is to argue that the task Perky set her subjects raised the threshold for perception, so that they were not perceiving the stimuli she showed them. I argue that even if this strategy fails, Perky's cases cannot prove the conclusion folk have wanted to draw. She showed her subjects, not the objects they went on to visualise, but crude pictures of such things. What they confused with visualising into seen space was thus, not perceptual consciousness of stimuli, but pictorial consciousness. Once we're clear about the nature of the latter, we can see that Perky's results reveal nothing very surprising at all.

This is a longer version of a paper to appear in 'Analysis' (July 2012).

Perky's famous experiments have been taken to show that at the limit perceiving and imagining (more precisely, seeing and visualising into seen space) do not differ phenomenologically. One way to block this result is to argue that the task Perky set her subjects raised the threshold for perception, so that they were not perceiving the stimuli she showed them. I argue that even if this strategy fails, Perky's cases cannot prove the conclusion folk have wanted to draw. She showed her subjects, not the objects they went on to visualise, but crude pictures of such things. What they confused with visualising into seen space was thus, not perceptual consciousness of stimuli, but pictorial consciousness. Once we're clear about the nature of the latter, we can see that Perky's results reveal nothing very surprising at all.