Explaining Imagination

by Peter Langland-Hassan

Overview

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process—one with its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states—judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198815068
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Pages:	328
Sales rank:	967,429
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter Langland-Hassan, Professor of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati

Peter Langland-Hassan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis, and holds a PhD in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center, and a BA in philosophy from Columbia University. His published work spans the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of cognitive science, and empirical psychology. He was a co-editor and contributor to Inner Speech: New Voices (OUP, 2018).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface xi

1 Explaining Imagination 1

2 Folk Psychology and Its Ontology 29

3 Imagistic Imagining Part I: Imagery, Attitude Imagining, and Recreative Imagining 53

4 Imagistic Imagining Part II: Hybrid Structure, Multiple Attitudes, and Daydreams 76

5 Conditional Reasoning Part I: Three Kinds of Conditionals and the Psychology of the Material Conditional 95

6 Conditional Reasoning Part II: Indicatives, Subjunctives, and the Ramsey Test 119

7 Pretense Part I: Metaphysics and Epistemology 144

8 Pretense Part II: Psychology 163

9 Consuming Fictions Part I: Recovering Fictional Truths 184

10 Consuming Fictions Part II: The Operator Claim 210

11 Consuming Fictions Part III: Immersion, Emotion, and the Paradox of Fiction 234

12 Creativity 262

References 297

Index 311

Editorial Reviews

"This is a groundbreaking work, and a phenomenal resource for those interested in this field. Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." — D. P. Prianti, Gannon University, CHOICE

From the Publisher