Philosophy Program Presents
The Bard Philosophy Club presents: Professor Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Olin Humanities Building
6:00 pm – 7:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
6:00 pm – 7:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
Imagination and Inference
Olin 101
A recently popular debate concerns whether the mental process of imagination can ever provide rational support for a belief. I will call the ones who affirm that it can provide rational support the “optimists” and the ones who deny that it can provide rational support the “pessimists”. The pessimist argument goes like this: imagination seems to be used, in part, to recreate prior experiences. But one cannot learn new things from prior experiences. Thus, imagination cannot teach us new things, and so imagination cannot provide an agent with rational support for belief in a proposition that the agent did not already have. Arguments by optimists vary in structure, depending on how they think imagination works. Optimists might be able to be broken up into two camps: those who believe that when imagination provides rational support, it is an inference wearing the veneer of imagination, which then also explains how it provides rational support; and those who believe that when imagination provides rational support, something epistemically novel is going on. In this paper I will be supporting the novelty view against the veneer view. In order to show that imagination is not just an inference wearing the veneer of imagination, I will also discuss the available views on what inferences are and suggest that the most plausible ones are compatible with my main claim.For more information, call 703-577-1435, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:00 pm – 7:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin Humanities Building