Abstract
AbstractExperiential imagination consists in an imaginative projection that aims at simulating the experiences one would undergo in different circumstances. It has been traditionally thought to play a role in how we build our lives, engage with other agents, and appreciate art. Although some philosophers have recently expressed doubts over the capacity of experiential imagination to offer insight into the perspective of someone other than our present-selves, experiential imagination remains a much sought-after tool. This paper substantiates pessimism about the epistemological value of these uses of experiential imagination by developing an embodied approach. Our thesis is that experiential imagination is robustly embodied because the sociohistorically situated body makes an irreducible contribution to the imaginative project, and that, as such, it is constrained by who we are as concrete agents. We argue that experiential imagination is an embodied, virtual exploration of imagined scenarios that depends on our situated history of sensorimotor and affective interactions. We conclude that experiential imagination is much more limited than commonly acknowledged, as it can hardly be divorced from who we are and where we have been.
Funder
european regional development fund
british academy postdoctoral fellowship
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Reference59 articles.
1. Bailey, O. (2022). Empathy and the value of humane understanding. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 104(1), 50–65.
2. Balcerak Jackson, M. (2018). Justification by imagination. In F. Macpherson & F. Dorsch (Eds.), Perceptual imagination and perceptual memory. Oxford University Press.
3. Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of emotion. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12, 1–23.
4. Barrett, L. F., & Bar, M. (2009). See it with feeling: Affective predictions during object perception. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series b, Biological Sciences, 364, 1325–1334.
5. Caracciolo, M. (2013). Blind reading: Toward an enactivist theory of the reader’s imagination. In L. Bernaerts, D. De Geest, L. Herman, & B. Vervaeck (Eds.), Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative (pp. 81–106). University of Nebraska Press.
Cited by
3 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献