Abstract
AbstractPretense imagination is imagination understood as the ability to recreate rational belief revision. This kind of imagination is used in pretend-play, risk-assessment, etc. Some even claim that this kind of hypothetical belief revision can be grounds to justify new beliefs in conditionals, in particular conditionals that play a foundational role in the epistemology of modality. In this paper, I will argue that it cannot. I will first provide a very general theory of pretense imagination, which I formalise using tools from dynamic epistemic logic. As a result, we can clearly see that pretense imagination episodes are build up out of two kinds of imaginative stages, so I will present an argument by cases. This argument shows that pretense imagination might indeed provide us with justification for believing certain conditionals. Despite this, I will argue that these are not the kind of conditionals that allow pretense imagination to play a foundational role in the epistemology of modality.
Highlights
Evaluating non-actual possibilities is crucial for our decision making and general survival when going around the world (Byrne 2005)
This is the kind of imagination that we use when we engage with pretense (e.g., Leslie 1994; Nichols and Stich 2003; Langland-Hassan 2012), and when we engage in planning and risk assessment (e.g., Byrne 2005)
Langland-Hassan (2016) and Williamson (2007, 2016) both argue that pretense imagination might be central to conditional reasoning and the epistemology of conditionals
Summary
Imagination can be a guide to what is possible. When deciding to move a heavy couch through the door, we might first imagine how to rotate the couch in order to get it through, before coming to believe that it possibly fits. I focus on one particular kind of recreativist account of imagination, namely imagination as the recreation of rational belief revision This is the kind of imagination that we use when we engage with pretense (e.g., Leslie 1994; Nichols and Stich 2003; Langland-Hassan 2012), and when we engage in planning and risk assessment (e.g., Byrne 2005). Children from a very young age already consistently point to the cup that has been turned upside down when asked to point at the ‘empty cup’ (cf Leslie 1994; Nichols and Stich 2003) This indicates that children are able to engage in pretense even if it goes against what they believe the world to be like.
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