Abstract
Imagination has recently attracted considerable attention from epistemologists and is recognized as a source of belief and even knowledge. One remarkable feature of imagination is that it is often and typically agentive: agents decide to imagine. In cases in which imagination results in a belief, the agentiveness of imagination may be taken to give rise to indirect doxastic control and epistemic responsibility. This observation calls for a proper understanding of agentive imagination. In particular, it calls for the development of a semantics of imagination ascriptions. In the present paper an earlier suggestion by Ilkka Niiniluoto for a logic of imagination is considered. This proposal does not capture the agentive nature of imagination, and an alternative semantics is suggested. The new semantics combines the modal logic of agency with the neighbourhood semantics from alethic modal logic.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Or basic voluntary control as Alston (1988) calls it in his well-known classification of kinds of control over beliefs.
Concerning the use of ‘imagination’ as a count noun, see footnote 7.
In a recent paper Grzankowski (2015) argues that pictures have propositional content.
In his book on objectual as opposed to propositional attitude ascriptions, Forbes (2006, p. 37) lists ‘imagine’ as a verb of depiction together with ‘draw’, ‘visualize’, ‘portray’, and some other verbs.
Another, not uncontroversial remarkable aspect of non-normal worlds semantics is that it is non-compositional in non-normal worlds.
Note that the German word ‘Vorstellung’ in Frege’s writings has been translated differently even by one and the same author. Max Black (Frege 1948, p. 208) translates it as ‘conception’, whereas in (Geach and Back 1960, p. 59) he translates it as ‘idea’, whilst Peter Geach in the same volume translates it as ‘image’, cf. (Geach and Back 1960, p. 7). What speaks in favour of these translations is that in German ‘Vorstellung’ definitely is a count noun; the ability to create pictures in one’s mind is called ‘die Vorstellungskraft’ (the power to imagine). The English word ‘imagination’ in most of its usages is a noncountable noun, although it may also be understood to mean a mental image (that may be formed by exercising the imagination as a faculty). Williamson (2013), for example, uses ‘imagination’ as a count noun.
It could be interesting to base a logic of imagination on a system of analytic implication that satisfies the “Proscriptive Principle” for theorems, a strong condition of a relevance connection between the antecedent and the succedent of a valid implication:
$$\begin{aligned} \vdash A \rightarrow B, \text{ implies } At(B) \subseteq At(A), \end{aligned}$$where At(A) is the set of atomic formulas that occur in A, cf. Ferguson (2015).
The modal operator \(\Box \) in the smallest normal modal logic is often referred to as a necessity operator although it is not factive, i.e, albeit \(\Box A \rightarrow A\) is not valid.
It may be doubted that the possibility operator of K represents logical possibility. Generally it is assumed that S5 is the logic of logical possibility and logical necessity.
The history-dependence of atomic formulas has been criticized, for example, by Mark Brown.
Belnap et al. (2001, p. 190) point out that this is a tensed, moment-dependent notion of proposition. They prefer to think of propositions as sets of histories and not as sets of moment/history-pairs.
References
Alston, W. (1988). The deontological conception of epistemic justification. In J. E. Tomberlin (Ed.), Philosophical perspectives (Vol. 2, pp. 257–299). Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company.
Belnap, N., Perloff, M., & Xu, M. (2001). Facing the future: Agents and choices in our indeterminist world. New York: Oxford UP.
Chellas, B. (1980). Modal logic: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Costa Leite, A. (2010). Logical properties of imagination. Abstracta, 6, 103–116.
Fagin, R., & Halpern, J. (1988). Belief, awareness and limited reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 34, 39–76.
Ferguson, T. M. (2015). Logics of nonsense and parry systems. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 44, 65–80.
Forbes, G. (2006). Attitude problems. An essay on linguistic intensionality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frege, G. (1892). ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, NF, 100, 25–50. English translations in Frege, G. (1948). Sense and reference. The Philosophical Review, 54, 209–230 and Geach, P., & Back, M. (Eds.). (1960). Translations from the philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege (2nd ed.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Frege, G. (1948). Sense and reference. The Philosophical Review, 54, 209–230. English translation by M. Black of Frege, G. (1892). ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, NF, 100, 25–50.
Geach, P., & Back, M. (Eds.). (1960). Translations from the philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege (2nd ed.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Gendler, T. (2013). Imagination. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (fall 2013 edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/imagination/.
Gendler, T., & Hawthorne, J. (Eds.). (2002). Conceivability and possibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grzankowski, A. (2015). Pictures have propositional content. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 6, 151–163.
Hintikka, J. (1975). The intentions of intentionality. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Horty, J. (1989). An alternative stit-operator. Manuscript, Philosophy Department, University of Maryland.
Horty, J. (2001). Agency and deontic logic. New York: Oxford UP.
Kind, A. (forthcoming). How imagination gives rise to knowledge. In F. Dorsch, & F. Macpherson (Eds.), Perceptual memory and perceptual imagination. Oxford University Press.
Kung, P. (2014). You really do imagine it: Against error theories of imagination. Noûs. doi:10.1111/nous.12060.
Niiniluoto, I. (1982). Remarks on the logic of perception. In I. Niiniluoto & E. Saarinen (Eds.), Intensional logic: Acta Philosophica Fennica (Vol. 35, pp. 116–129). Helsinki: Philosophical Society of Finland.
Niiniluoto, I. (1983). On the logic of imagination. In I. Patoluoto, et al. (Eds.), Vexing questions. Reports from the Dept. of Philosophy (pp. 23–28). Helsinki: University of Helsinki, No 3.
Niiniluoto, I. (1985). Imagination and fiction. Journal of Semantics, 4, 209–222.
Priest, G. (2005). Towards non-being: The logic and metaphysics of intentionality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Priest, G. (2009). Neighborhood semantics for intentional operators. The Review of Symbolic Logic, 2, 360–373.
Rantala, V. (1982). Impossible worlds semantics and logical omniscience. Acta Philosophica Fennica, 35, 106–115.
Rantala, V. (1982). Quantified modal logic: Non-normal worlds and propositional attitudes. Studia Logica, 41, 41–65.
Sallis, J. (2012). Logic of imagination. The expanse of the elemental, studies in continental thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Spaulding, S. (to appear). Imagination through knowledge. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.) Knowledge through imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thomas, N. J. T. (2014). Mental imagery. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (fall 2014 edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/mental-imagery/.
Tye, M. (1991). The imagery debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
von Kutschera, F. (1986). Bewirken. Erkenntnis, 24, 253–281.
van Woudenberg, R. (2006). Introduction: Knowledge through imagination. Metaphilosophy, 37, 151–161.
Wansing, H. (1989). Bemerkungen zur Semantik nicht-normaler möglicher Welten. Zeitschrift für mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik, 35, 551–557.
Wansing, H. (1990). A general possible worlds framework for reasoning about knowledge and belief. Studia Logica, 49, 523–539. 50, 359.
Wansing, H. (2002). Seeing to it that an agent forms a belief. Logic and Logical Philosophy, 10, 185–197.
Wansing, H. (2006). Doxastic decisions, epistemic justification, and the logic of agency. Philosophical Studies, 128, 201–227.
Wansing, H. (2006). Tableaux for multi-agent deliberative-stit logic. In G. Governatori, I. Hodkinson, & Y. Venema (Eds.), Advances in modal logic (Vol. 6, pp. 503–520). London: College Publications.
Williams, B. (1973). Deciding to believe. In Problems of the self (pp. 136–151). New York: Cambridge UP.
Williamson, T. (2013). Knowing by imagining. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge through imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP. http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/_data/assets/pdf_file/0007/29941/kindfinal.
Winters, B. (1979). Believing at will. Journal of Philosophy, 76(1979), 243–256.
Woods, J. (1974). The logic of fiction: Philosophical soundings of deviant logic. Mouton, The Hague and Paris. (Reprinted from The Logic of fiction. Studies in Logic, Vol. 23, by J. Woods, Ed., 2009, London: College Publications.
Xu, M. (1998). Axioms for deliberative stit. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 27, 505–552.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Roberto Ciuni, Andrea Kruse, Daniel Skurt, and Christian Straßer for comments on a colloquium presentation of this paper in Bochum, and three anonymous referees for their useful comments. Moreover, Roberto Ciuni and Graham Priest kindly made some helpful critical remarks in correspondence.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wansing, H. Remarks on the logic of imagination. A step towards understanding doxastic control through imagination. Synthese 194, 2843–2861 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0945-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0945-4