Reasoning with Imagination

Abstract

This chapter argues that epistemic uses of the imagination are a sui generis form of reasoning. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, there are imaginings which instantiate the epistemic structure of reasoning. Second, reasoning with imagination is not reducible to reasoning with doxastic states. Thus, the imagination is a distinctive medium through which one can reason out what follows from one’s evidence. This view has a number of important implications for the epistemology of the imagination. For one thing, it clarifies the epistemic role of widely invoked “constraints” on the imagination. For another, it points to important and underappreciated disanalogies between perception and imagination. Ultimately, the view that we can reason with imagination offers an illuminating and theoretically fruitful framework through which to understand the epistemic structure of the imagination.

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