Towards a new theory of knowing by imagining

Abstract

This dissertation aims to develop a nuanced understanding the relationship between knowledge, imagination, and action in the light of some classical Indian, modern European, and more recent Euro-American sources on these subjects. The narrow thesis is that imagination is a distinct and indispensable source of knowledge—on a par with perceptual experience and rational inference—because it is our sole means of finding out, for the first time, that a novel future action is possible for a particular agent in that agent’s concrete circumstances. The introductory chapter aims to familiarize the reader with the central problematic: the problem of explaining how imagination could ever lead to knowledge. Chapter Two is an exploratory survey of some historical views on the nature of imagination. The result is what I label the “transfigurative conception of imagination” as the power to “present the absent” by actively restructuring the elements of present experience. Chapter Three then reviews some presuppositions of mainstream epistemology which give rise to the “Puzzle of Imaginative Use,” a current formulation of the central problematic. After proposing a principled objection to all extant solutions to the Puzzle, the chapter ends by adducing some philosophical precedent for the view I aim to advance in later chapters. Chapter Four begins to develop that view by sketching an enactivist account of imagination as a source of modal knowledge. Chapter Five applies this account to the domain of practical modal knowledge, the awareness of possibility and necessity that guides our day-to-day activities. Chapter Six then attempts to find, or where necessary, to create some theoretical elbow-room in which to formulate an alternative account of the epistemic value of imagining. The concluding chapter consolidates the results of the entire discussion and indicates some promising directions for future research.