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Szabó Gendler, T. (2010). Intuition, imagination, & philosophical methodology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (5/15/11, 3:59 AM) Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (10/21/23, 6:42 AM) |
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| Resource type: Book ID no. (ISBN etc.): 978-0-19-958976-0 BibTeX citation key: SzaboGendler2010a Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: Imagination Creators: Szabó Gendler Publisher: Oxford University Press (Oxford) |
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| Quotes |
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p.56
"[A] thought experiment is just a process of reasoning carried out within the context of a well-articulated imaginary scenario in order to answer a specific question about a non-imaginary situation."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Imagination Reason |
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pp.118–119
Quoting Thordyke (1922, p.33) "the mind is ruled by habit throughout" and reasoning is no more than "the organization and cooperation of habits."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Reason Cognition |
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p.132
"...by presenting context in a suitably concrete or abstract way, thought experiments may recruit representational schemas that were previously inactive. As a result, they may evoke responses that run counter to those evoked by alternative presentations of relevantly similar content."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Immersion Virtuality |
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p.136
"...imaginative content is taken to be governed by the same sort of restrictions that govern believed content" -- mirroring in pretense-episodes.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Belief Imagination |
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p.139
Belief is a "receptive attitude whereas pretense is a productive attitude". In the former, the person responds "to something in the world itself" whereas, in the latter, the person projects "something onto the world".
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Belief Immersion |
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p.148
"..."priming" and thinking about affect both pattern-recognition and perceptual interpretation". cf the Availability Heuristic -- "judgments concerning the likelihood or relative frequency of events or objects" are made according to the 'availability' of such events and objects to memory, perception and imagination. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Imaginary contagion Perception |
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p.149
Contagion: "...the evocation of perceptual and evaluative schemata is relatively indifferent to whether the evocation occurs as a result of something in the ambient environment, something in memory, or something brought to mind merely as a result of imaginative rehearsal. In all these cases, the consequent availability of the object, event, or schema plays a central role in subsequent attention, perception, and even reasoning."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Imaginary contagion Perception Reason |
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p.150
"The rule-based governedness of generative principles is part of what allows us to structure imaginative space in a way that lets us make sense of its content."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Imagination Immersion Space Visual Space |
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p.180, Chapter 9
Imaginative resistance: "the puzzle of explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Imagination Imaginative resistance |
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p.182
"The trick that allows an author complete freedom in dictating whether or not character A murders character B is much less effective if what the author wants to dictate is that the murder is, for instance, praiseworthy, or noble, or charming, or admirable. So the puzzle is this: what explains why a trick so effective in so many realms is relatively ineffective here?"
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Imagination |
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p.195
"whether or not we are inclined to respond with imaginative resistance [depends on] why we think we're being asked to imagine [certain scenarios]."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Imagination Imaginative resistance |
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pp.198–199
With regard to realistic fiction, non-distorting fiction, things can be learned and exported from the fictional world to the actual world, adding them to a stock of knowledge about the world. "cases that evoke genuine imaginative resistance will be cases where the reader feels that she is being asked to export a way of looking at the actual world which she does not wish to add to her conceptual repertoire." (p.199) Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Imagination Imaginative resistance |
| p.199 "For a story to even make sense, a great number of things that are held to be true within the fiction must be held to be true outside it, and vice versa." This includes moral principles Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard |
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p.201
Re imaginative resistance: "The Impossibility Hypothesis traces the failure to a problem with the fictional world. It says essentially: we are unable to follow the author's lead because the world she has tried to make fictional is impossible. My alternative proposal traces it to a problem with our relations to the actual world. It says essentially: we are unwilling to follow the author's lead because in trying to make that world fictional, she is providing us with a way of looking at this world that we prefer to not to embrace."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Imagination Imaginative resistance Impossibility hypothesis Uncanny |
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p.201
"imagination requires a sort of participation that mere hypothetical reasoning does not."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Imaginary contagion Reason |
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p.202
"imagination is distinct from belief on the one hand and from mere supposition on te other. It is this which explains both our general capacity to imagine morally deviant situations and our general unwillingness to do so."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Belief Imagination |
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p.203
"mental representations can be activated in a multitude of ways, and [...] awakening the associative patterns linked with a particular stereotype, mental image, or protocol, or motor routine tends to awaken the perception and action dispositions associated with it."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Embodied cognition Perception |
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p.224
"we countenance all sorts of combination as being true in fiction, and credit ourselves with having imagined them, even though we are in no position to make full sense of what that combination would amount to. It is crucial to realize that if one refuses to grant this, one has basically opted out of the fiction game altogether."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Imaginative resistance |
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p.227
Explaining the 'paradox of fictional emotions' which "involves a jointly inconsistent but individually plausible trio of claims. According to the paradox, it is simultaneously true that a) we have genuine and rational emotional responses towards certain imaginary characters and situations while b) believing those characters and situations to be purely fictional. But it is also true that c) in order for us to have a genuine and rational emotional responses towards a character (or situation), we must not believe that the character (or situation) is purely fictional." SG rejects the 3rd of these conditions in this chapter. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Emotion |
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pp.228–229
SG follows the work of Antonio Damasio and Paul Harris in suggesting that it is not necessary to believe situations and characters to be non-fictional in order to have real emotional responses towards them. "Rather, we will suggest, our cognitive architecture is such that without the tendency to feel (something relevantly akin to) real emotions in the case of merely imagined situations, we would be largely unable to engage in practical reasoning."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Emotion Imagination Reason |
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pp.238–239, Chapter 12
Dealing with imaginative contagion: "cases where merely imagining or pretending that P has effects that we would expect only perceiving or believing that P to have."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Belief Imaginary contagion |
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p.239
"Imaginative contagion arises because certain features of our mental architecture are source-indifferent, in the sense that they process internally and externally generated content in similar ways." Internally generated content is marked by pretense and image as opposed to belief and perception re externally generated content. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Imaginary contagion |
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pp.246–247
Affective contagion: "There are numerous occasions where the mere contemplation of an emotionally charged situation causes the subject to behave as if the situation were probable enough to influence prudent behavior." (p.246) "though there may well be differences in intensity between emotional responses to real and imagined scenarios, quarantining is decidedly ineffective, and contagion is the norm." (p.247) Hence the role emotion plays in rational thinking and decision making (cf Damasio). Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Affect Emotion Reason |
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p.262
"alief is associative, action-generating, affect-laden, arational, automatic, agnostic with respect to its content, shared with non-human animals, and developmentally and conceptually antecedent to other cognitive attitudes."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Alief |
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p.263
"A paradigmatic alief is a mental state with associatively linked content that is representational, affective and behavioral, and that is activated--consciously or non-consciously--by features of the subject's internal or ambient environment. Aliefs may be either occurrent or dispositional." Examples SG gives include refusing to eat fudge shaped like dog faeces (even though you believe it to be be perfectly delicious), fear of walking on glass over a dangerous drop (even though you believe the glass to be safe), refusal to wear the shirt of someone you hate (even though, freshly laundered, you believe it to be clean). Alief is often, (not always) discordant with belief. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Alief Belief |
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p.281
"if alief drives behavior in belief-discordant cases, it is likely that it drives behavior in belief-concordant cases as well. Belief plays an inportant role in the ultimate regulation of behavior. But it plays a far smaller role in moment-by-moment management than philosophical tradition has tended to stress."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Alief Belief |
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p.297
"Beliefs change in response to changes in evidence; aliefs change in responses to changes in habit. If new evidence won't cause you to change your behavior in response to an apparent stimulus, then your reaction is due to alief rather than belief."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Alief Belief |
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p.298
"The assumption that behavior invariably indicates belief arises from aliefs that are mistaken for beliefs."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Alief Belief |
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p.299
"Imagination [in some cases] gives rise to behavior via alief. What happens in imagination may have (non-pretend) effects beyond imagination--but it does so when the process of imagining activates a subject's innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Alief Imagination |
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p.301
"Aliefs activate behavioral propensities. So (in conjunction with desire) do beliefs (and their teleofunctional analogues)." Sometimes these propensities coincide (norm-concordant aliefs may govern the behavioural tendencies); sometimes they are at odds with each other (norm-discordant aliefs govern the behaviour). Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Alief Belief |
| Paraphrases |
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pp.55–73, Chapter 3
An essay about the reliability of judgments derived from imaginary scenarios and thought experiments. The conclusion is that judgments are often not reliable because the derivation of such judgments proceeds from the framing of the scenario. i.e. the telling of the story affects the outcome. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Embodied cognition Imagination |
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p.55
Imaginary scenarios allow us to make judgments about the imaginary case, which features are essential etc. which can be applied to the actual case. This is supposed to be the rationale for using such scenarios but the author thinks such methodology unreliable. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Imagination |
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p.119
The ability to reason properly and correctly is usually better "when the materials are presented with familiar content." e.g. the facility to undertake simple arithmatic is improved when the symbols used are simple rather than complex. If x = 1 and y = 2 then x + y = ? rather than if B1 = 1 and B2 = 2 then B1 + B2 = ? If nonsense terms are used, this becomes difficult although some individuals have no problem.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Reason |
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pp.120–121
Examples of belief-bias in selection tasks and matching-bias. Matching-bias -- in a selection task, if items available for selection are given in the statement to be tested, subjects will invariably pick them even if the reasoning is invalid. There are examples of context-based effects too. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Belief Reason Comments: e.g. Context/framing has importance in reasoning. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (2011-05-15 04:30:44) |
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pp.123–124
Reasoning (according to Steven Sloman's Two Systems) involves two systems: Associative and Rule-based. The first (System 1) operates on similarity, contiguity, is automatic, uses generalization, soft constraints and is exemplified by intuition, imagination, fantasy, creativity etc. Rule-based reasoning (System 2) uses symbol manipulation, derives knowledge from language, culture and formal systems, uses hard constraints, can operate on concrete, general and abstract concepts and is exemplified by explanation, deliberation, verification, formal analysis, strategic memory. Division into two systems may be simplisitic but there is certainly not just one system used for reasoning. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Actuality Knowledge Reason Virtuality |
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p.136
Discussing pretense. Children's games of pretense exhibit two features. Quarantining: "events within the pretense-episode are taken to have effects only within that pretense-episode". Spilling pretend tea from a teapot will not really wet the table. Mirroring: "features of the imaginary situation that have not been explicitly stipulated are derivable via features of their real-world analogues". Tipping the teapot will make the table wet within the pretense-episode. The exception to quarantining is 'contagion'; the exception to mirroring is 'disparity'. 'contagion' may be 'affective transmission' (child scared of the dark because of imagined monsters) or 'cognitive transmission' (child playing at bird-watching may ascribe bird-like features to partically seen animal -- dog behind hedge). 'disparity' -- imaginary content in its difference to believed content may be 'incomplete' or 'incoherent'. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Imaginary contagion Imagination Immersion |
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p.138
Quarantining and contagion appear to be mainly automatic processes whilst mirroring and disparity primarily arise from cognitive control.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Cognition Imaginary contagion |
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p.150
Successful imagination may be incomplete or incoherent -- exhibit disparity. If incomplete, even in pretense, some features may be unspecified or unspecifiable. If incoherent, some features are logically or conceptually incompatible. The illusion that the pretense is complete and coherent comes "from imaginative reliance on a picture that treats imagining as just like belief, only off-line, and from a picture of prop-based pretense that treats principles of generation as complete, uniform mappings from one realm to another." (p.150).
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Belief Embodied cognition Imagination Immersion |
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pp.199–200
In some cases we recognize that deviance from fact-established concept is not intended for export from the storyworld -- export is not the intent of the author. In others, "because we recognize that there are instances of actual moral disagreement" (p.200), it is unclear to us if the author intended them to be exported or not. Hence imaginative resistance.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Imagination Imaginative resistance |
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pp.214–217
Discussing pop-outs in fiction. Where instead of the reader assuming the author is presenting a proposition about the fictional world, the reader assumes the proposition is about the real world. "[T]o imagine something in the context of the story -- and to believe some corresponding claim about the actual world" (p.216). Pop-outs are often moral propositions because they are related to the problem of imaginative resistance but can be non-moral as well. Pop-outs are a case of "authoritative breakdown" (p.217) -- we take the claim about the real world to be fake, we resist believing it. therefore resist the invitation to imagine it in the fictional world. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Imaginative resistance Immersion |
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pp.217–219
Appraisals of a pop-out as pop-out arise either from superfluousness or proscription. Pop-outs have either been previously implied or precluded and both forms of appraisal are subject to "the principles of generation governing truth-in-fiction in the context of the story" (p.218). i.e. the rules of the fictional world. This appraisal is under the control of both author and reader. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard |
| p.219 If a pop-out is proscribed, the reader is both baffled by being asked to believe something that does not make sense in the fictional world and resisting because, as the real world analogue of the pop-out is also not true, there is something awry with the fictional proposition. We call upon the evidence of the real world because we are being presented with an appraisal rather than a fictive fact. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard |
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pp.222–226
The effects of pop-outs can be mitigated through 'partial mappings' whereby the fictional proposition bears just enough similarity to real world counterparts to be accepted as is within the fictional world.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Imaginative resistance |
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pp.232–233
Discussing the work of Walton. Walton denied that fictional emotions were real, actual emotions. For example, the object of the emotion must exist (be non-fictional) otherwise these 'quasi-emotions' do not lead to motivation and action. "Fear emasculated by subtracting its distinctive motivational force is not fear at all" (Walton, Kendall. (1990). Mimesis as Make-believe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. pp.201-202). To this SG responds by saying emotions are genuine, and non-fictional, when we review past events (death of a relative) or imagine future events (stock market crash) and neither of these require the object of the emotion to be present. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Emotion Fear |
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p.265
An alief can actually occur when a cluster of dispositions to entertain such aliefs are activated (occurrent alief). A dispositional alief is the propensity for an occurrent alief to take place were the right conditions or external stimulus to occur. A subject alieves with representational-affective-behavioural content. S alieves R-A-B. SG terms this a four-place relation: "[subject], dog-shit, disgusting, refuse-to-eat" (p.262). SG suggest it can also be, and might be better, described as two-place: "S (occurrently) alieves R when S's R-related associations are activated and thereby rendered cognitively, affectively, and behaviorally salient" (p.265). Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Alief Belief |
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p.266
Aliefs tend to reveal themselves to us precisely when they are discordant with beliefs.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Alief Belief |
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pp.268–271
Alief differs from belief thus: 1. Belief and imagination are propositional. 2. belief and imagination involve acceptance. 3. Alief may be activated non-consciously. 4. Alief may be activated at will. 5. I believe that P and imagine that non-P "violates no norms" (p.271). I believe that P and alieve that non-P -- "something is amiss" (p.271). Norms of cognitive-behavioural coherence are violated. 6. Belief is reality-sensitive, imagination is reality-insensitive. Alief is neither. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Keywords: Alief Belief |
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pp.302–303
Gives examples of various media, including computer games, that exploit "our tendency to respond to merely apparent stimuli in habitual ways" (p.303).
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Alief Immersion |