Franz Berto (U. Saint Andrews)
Why imagine? What was the point for our ancestors, busy with very real problems like feeding and breeding, to explore unrealized possibilities in their minds? A promising answer is that imagination helps with planning as well as tackling causal and explanatory connections: Would I make it to the other side if I jumped the stream? Would we see these footprints if a deer had just passed by? But how can imagination give us knowledge of reality, if it’s arbitrary departure from it? A promising answer is that the relevant sort of imagination works as simulated belief revision: imagining A, we find B likely to the extent that B is found likely after a minimal revision of our beliefs on the supposition A. Then one can study it by applying a wealth of techniques from rational belief revision theory. I’ll focus on counterfactual imagination (imagining how things would be or have been like, if something was or had been the case) and I’ll give a couple of examples, one using modal logic and one using probabilities, or how tools from formal epistemology can help us model and explain imaginative thinking.
