Papers by Peter Langland-Hassan
Explaining Imagination
Three related questions—metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological—about pretense and its r... more Three related questions—metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological—about pretense and its relationship to imagination are distinguished. Answers to the metaphysical and epistemological questions are defended in the balance of the chapter. In response to the metaphysical question of what it is to pretend, it’s argued that we need not invoke a sui generis notion of imagination, nor a concept of pretend, in order to say what qualifies someone as pretending. To pretend that x is y is, roughly, to intentionally make some x y-like while believing that x will not, in the process, become a y. Nor, in answer to the epistemological question, need we hold that the recognition of pretense in others requires attributing to them sui generis imaginings, or a primitive mental state concept of PRETEND. Pretense can be recognized—when it is recognizable at all—via superficial features of a person’s behavior.
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Explaining Imagination
The relationship of attitude imagining to imagistic imagining is explored in depth. Formal charac... more The relationship of attitude imagining to imagistic imagining is explored in depth. Formal characterizations are given of each. A nuanced definition of ‘mental imagery’ is developed as a means to better-defining I-imagining. Competing attempts to define A-imagining in terms of a certain “direction of fit” are criticized, as are attempts to distinguish “mere supposition” from A-imagining. It is then argued that A-imagining and I-imagining pick out overlapping but distinct sets of mental phenomena. Some A-imginings are I-imaginings, and some I-imaginings are A-imaginings. But neither is a sub-set of the other. Several strains of resistance to that conclusion are considered and rejected. Currie & Ravenscroft’s (2002) notion of “recreative imagining” is closely analyzed with the conclusion that it does not pick out a third theoretically important class of imaginings.
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Currie’s (2010) argument that “i-desires” must be posited to explain our responses to fiction is ... more Currie’s (2010) argument that “i-desires” must be posited to explain our responses to fiction is critically discussed. It is argued that beliefs and desires featuring ‘in the fiction’ operators—and not sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires")—are the crucial states involved in generating fiction-directed affect. A defense of the “Operator Claim” is mounted, according to which ‘in the fiction’ operators would be also be required within fiction-directed sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" and "i-desires"), were there such. Once we appreciate that even fiction-directed sui generis imaginings would need to incorporate ‘in the fiction’ operators, the main appeal of the idea that sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires") are at work in fiction-appreciation dissipates. [This is Chapter 10 of Explaining Imagination (OUP, 2020)
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Explaining Imagination, 2020
Three types of conditional are distinguished: the material conditional, indicative conditional, a... more Three types of conditional are distinguished: the material conditional, indicative conditional, and subjunctive/counterfactual conditional. The apparent difference in truth conditions of each is suggestive of different psychological procedures used in the evaluation of each. The psychology of the material conditional is then examined. Despite procedures in formal logic that are suggestive of sui generis imaginative states (e.g., “assuming” a proposition for conditional proof, or for reductio), we need not countenance the use of such states within the psychological procedures used to carry out the inferences. Further, work in psychology has long suggested that humans do not, as a rule, reason in accordance with normative standards appropriate to the material conditional. A popular alternative proposal in psychology is that conditional reasoning involves the use of mental models (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002). The use of mental models is shown to be consistent with conditional reasonin...
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Explaining Imagination, 2020
This chapter argues that I-imaginings (viz., episodes of thought involving mental imagery) should... more This chapter argues that I-imaginings (viz., episodes of thought involving mental imagery) should be conceived of as hybrid states, involving both a mental image and a non-imagistic mental state of some kind. A proposal is then developed for how to understand the relationship between the image and non-imagistic element within I-imaginings, with images serving to predicate properties of an object determined by the non-imagistic element. Within the terms of this account, we can see how some I-imaginings are simply image-involving judgments (what I call JIGs), image-involving desires (DIGs), or image-involving decisions (DECs). Moreover, in some cases, these JIGs, DIGs, and DECs will also be cases of elaborated, rich, epistemically safe thought about the merely possible, fantastical or unreal—and so also constitute cases of A-imagining. In addition, some of these A-imaginings are what are colloquially known as “daydreams.” The chapter closes by responding to worries that the hybrid vie...
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The Philosophical Review, 2021
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Explaining Imagination
Further challenges to the idea that sui generis imaginings account for our affective responses to... more Further challenges to the idea that sui generis imaginings account for our affective responses to fiction are developed. The chapter then undertakes an extended analysis of the “paradox of fiction”—viz., the claim that it is irrational or inappropriate to respond emotionally to mere fictions—and proposes a novel solution. A number of theorists have held that special features of imagination play a role in resolving the paradox. It is argued that these proposals fail on their own terms and that the paradox can nevertheless be resolved in a way consistent with our emotional reactions to fiction being grounded in beliefs and desires. Coming to terms with the paradox requires both understanding why the “rug-pull” structure of the examples typically used to motivate it are disanalogous to our experience of fictions, and appreciating the specific emotional norms relevant to fiction-appreciation.
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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2022
Despite the recent upsurge in research on abstract concepts, there remain puzzles at the foundati... more Despite the recent upsurge in research on abstract concepts, there remain puzzles at the foundation of their empirical study. These are most evident when we consider what is required to assess a person's abstract conceptual abilities without using language as a prompt or requiring it as a response-as in classic non-verbal categorization tasks, which are standardly considered tests of conceptual understanding. After distinguishing two divergent strands in the most common conception of what it is for a concept to be abstract, we argue that neither reliably captures the kind of abstraction required to successfully categorize in non-verbal tasks. We then present a new conception of concept abstractness-termed Trial Concreteness-that is keyed to individual categorization trials. It has advantages in capturing the context-relativity of the degree of abstraction required for the application of a concept and fittingly correlates with participant success in recent experiments.
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To some it is a shallow platitude that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component... more To some it is a shallow platitude that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component. To others, it is an empirical hypothesis with accumulating support. To yet others it is a false dogma. In this chapter, I defend the claim that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component, confining the claim to adults with ordinary speech and hearing. It is one thing, I emphasize, to assert that inner speech often, or even typically, has an auditory-phonological component—quite another to propose that it always does. When forced to argue for the stronger point, we stand to make a number of interesting discoveries about inner speech itself, and about our means for discriminating it from other psycholinguistic phenomena. Establishing the stronger conclusion also provides new leverage on debates concerning how we should conceive of, diagnose, and explain auditory verbal hallucinations and “inserted thoughts” in schizophrenia
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Explaining Imagination
Comparatively easy questions we might ask about creativity are distinguished from the hard questi... more Comparatively easy questions we might ask about creativity are distinguished from the hard question of explaining transformative creativity. Many have focused on the easy questions and, in so doing, have offered no reason to think that the imagining relied upon in creative cognition cannot be reduced to more basic folk psychological states. The relevance of associative thought processes to songwriting is then explored as a means for understanding the nature of transformative creativity. Productive artificial neural networks—known as generative antagonistic networks (GANs)—are recent examples of how a system’s ability to generate creative products can be both finely tuned by prior experience and grounded in strategies that are inarticulable to the system itself. Further, the kinds of processes exploited by GANs need not be seen as incorporating anything akin to sui generis imaginative states. The chapter concludes with reflection on the added relevance of personal character to explan...
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Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
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WIREs Cognitive Science
Inner speech travels under many aliases: the inner voice, verbal thought, thinking in words, inte... more Inner speech travels under many aliases: the inner voice, verbal thought, thinking in words, internal verbalization, "talking in your head," the "little voice in the head," and so on. It is both a familiar element of first-person experience and a psychological phenomenon whose complex cognitive components and distributed neural bases are increasingly well understood. There is evidence that inner speech plays a variety of cognitive roles, from enabling abstract thought, to supporting metacognition, memory, and executive function. One active area of controversy concerns the relation of inner speech to auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) in schizophrenia, with a common proposal being that sufferers of AVH misidentify their own inner speech as being generated by someone else. Recently, researchers have used artificial intelligence to translate the neural and neuromuscular signatures of inner speech into corresponding outer speech signals, laying the groundwork for a variety of new applications and interventions. This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Philosophy > Consciousness Philosophy > Psychological Capacities.
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Synthese, 2022
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Cats and dogs are the same kind of thing in being mammals, even if cats are not a kind of dog. In... more Cats and dogs are the same kind of thing in being mammals, even if cats are not a kind of dog. In the same way, remembering and imagining might be the same kind of mental state, even if remembering is not a kind of imagining. This chapter explores whether episodic remembering, on the one hand, and future and counter-factual directed imagistic imagining, on the other, may be the same kind of mental state in being instances of the same cognitive attitude. I outline a continuist position where all three involve the same judgment-like attitude and compare its advantages to a discontinuist alternative where remembering requires use of its own distinctive attitude. Reasons are given for favoring a version of the continuist position, though this chapter’s focus is on the metatheoretical questions of how to go about understanding remembering in terms of a content and attitude pair, and which considerations are relevant when deciding among competing content/attitude pairs.
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Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2021
This essay unites current philosophical thinking on imagination with a burgeoning debate in the p... more This essay unites current philosophical thinking on imagination with a burgeoning debate in the philosophy of memory over whether episodic remembering is simply a kind of imagining. So far, this debate has been hampered by a lack of clarity in the notion of imagining at issue. Several options are considered and constructive imagining is identified as the relevant kind. Next, a functionalist account of episodic remembering is defended as a means to establishing two key points: first, one need not defend a factive (or causalist) view of remembering in order to hold that causal connections to past experiences are essential to how rememberings are typed; and, second, current theories that equate remembering with imagining are in fact consistent with a functionalist theory that includes causal connections in its account of what it is to remember. This suggests that remembering is not a kind of imagining and clarifies what it would take to establish the contrary.
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The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain, 2017
This chapter (from Routledge's forthcoming handbook on the philosophy of pain) considers the ... more This chapter (from Routledge's forthcoming handbook on the philosophy of pain) considers the question of whether people are always correct when they judge themselves to be in pain, or not in pain. While I don't show sympathy for traditional routes to the conclusion that people are "incorrigible" in their pain judgments, I explore--and perhaps even advocate--a different route to such incorrigibility. On this low road to incorrigibility, a sensory state's being judged unpleasant is what makes it a pain (or not)
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Noûs, 2016
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Knowledge Through Imagination, 2016
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Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2015
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Papers by Peter Langland-Hassan