Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you anywhere
Abstract
There is some consensus on the claim that imagination as suppositional thinking can have epistemic value insofar as it's constrained by a principle of minimal alteration of how we know or believe reality to be – compatibly with the need to accommodate the supposition initiating the imaginative exercise. But in the philosophy of imagination there is no formally precise account of how exactly such minimal alteration is to work. I propose one. I focus on counterfactual imagination, arguing that this can be modeled as simulated belief revision governed by Laplacian imaging. So understood, it can be rationally justified by accuracy considerations: it minimizes expected belief inaccuracy, as measured by the Brier score.
Citation
Berto , F 2024 , ' Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you anywhere ' , Noûs , vol. 58 , no. 3 , pp. 717-729 . https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12476
Publication
Noûs
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0029-4624Type
Journal article
Description
Funding: H2020 European Research Council. Grant Number: 681404.Collections
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