Taming the runabout imagination ticket

Francesco Berto

doi:10.1007/s11229-018-1751-6

Taming the runabout imagination ticket

Francesco Berto^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Philosophy

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

The ‘puzzle of imaginative use’ (Kind and Kung in Knowledge through imagination, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016) asks: given that imagination is arbitrary escape from reality, how can it have any epistemic value? In particular, imagination seems to be logically anarchic, like a runabout inference ticket: one who imagines A may also imagine whatever B pops to one’s mind by free mental association. This paper argues that at least a certain kind of imaginative exercise—reality-oriented mental simulation—is not logically anarchic. Showing this is part of the task of solving the puzzle. Six plausible features of imagination, so understood, are listed. Then a formal semantics is provided, whose patterns of logical validity and invalidity model the six features.

Original language	English
Number of pages	15
Journal	Synthese
Volume	First Online
Early online date	13 Mar 2018
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1751-6
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 13 Mar 2018

Keywords

Aboutness
Counterfactual thinking
Epistemology of imagination
Mental simulation
Variably strict epistemic modals

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Berto_2018_Synthese_runabout_CC
© The Author(s) 2018. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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Cite this

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title = "Taming the runabout imagination ticket",

abstract = "The {\textquoteleft}puzzle of imaginative use{\textquoteright} (Kind and Kung in Knowledge through imagination, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016) asks: given that imagination is arbitrary escape from reality, how can it have any epistemic value? In particular, imagination seems to be logically anarchic, like a runabout inference ticket: one who imagines A may also imagine whatever B pops to one{\textquoteright}s mind by free mental association. This paper argues that at least a certain kind of imaginative exercise—reality-oriented mental simulation—is not logically anarchic. Showing this is part of the task of solving the puzzle. Six plausible features of imagination, so understood, are listed. Then a formal semantics is provided, whose patterns of logical validity and invalidity model the six features.",

keywords = "Aboutness, Counterfactual thinking, Epistemology of imagination, Mental simulation, Variably strict epistemic modals",

author = "Francesco Berto",

note = "This research is published within the project {\textquoteleft}The Logic of Conceivability{\textquoteright}, funded by the European Research Council (ERC CoG), Grant Number 681404.",

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Taming the runabout imagination ticket

Abstract

Keywords

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