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The Development of Imaginative Cognition1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2014

Deena Skolnick Weisberg
Deena Skolnick Weisberg*
Affiliation:
The University of Pennsylvaniadeena.weisberg@psych.upenn.edu
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Extract

Over the last ten years or so, many cognitive scientists have begun to work on topics traditionally associated with philosophical aesthetics, such as issues about the objectivity of aesthetic judgments and the nature of aesthetic experience. An increasingly interdisciplinary turn within philosophy has started to take advantage of these connections, to the benefit of all. But one area that has been somewhat overlooked in this new dialogue is developmental psychology, which treats questions about whether and to what extent children's intuitions about various aspects of aesthetic experience match those of adults, as well as the origins and developmental trajectories of these intuitions. The current paper reviews some recent work in developmental psychology that has the potential to inform philosophical research on a variety of topics – not necessarily because of this work tells us directly about what children think, but because learning what children's aesthetic intuitions are and how they develop can help us to better understand why adults have the intuitions that they do.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 75: Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art , October 2014 , pp. 85 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2014 

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Footnotes

1

The author would like to thank the organizers and attendees of the 2012 AHRC workshop on “Method in Philosophical Aesthetics: The Challenge from the Sciences” for their insightful comments and questions. Thanks also to Paul Bloom, Joshua Goodstein, Alison Gopnik, Alan Leslie, David Sobel, Lu Wang, and Michael Weisberg for their support of the projects reported in this paper.

References

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27 See D. S. Weisberg & A. Gopnik, ‘Pretense, counterfactuals, and Bayesian causal models: Why what is not real really matters,’ op. cit.

28 For example, Byrne, R. M. J., The rational imagination: How people create alternatives to reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Gopnik, A., The philosophical baby: What children's minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009)Google Scholar; Hoerl, C., McCormack, T. & Beck, S. R., Understanding counterfactuals, understanding causation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Seligman, M., Railton, P., Baumeister, R., & Sripada, C., ‘Navigating into the future or driven by the past,’ Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8 (2013), 119–141CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Weisberg, D. S., ‘The vital importance of imagination’ in Brockman, M. (ed.), What's next? Dispatches on the future of science (New York: Vintage Books, 2009)Google Scholar.