Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you anywhere

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 09-2024
Journal Noûs
Volume | Issue number 58 | 3
Pages (from-to) 717-729
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
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.
Document type Article
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12476
Downloads
Permalink to this page
Back