'Imagining under Constraints'

The Department of Philosophy welcomes Amy Kind presenting "Imagining Under Constraints." As Hume has famously claimed, we are nowhere more free than in our imagination. While this feature of the imagination suggests that the imagination has a crucial role to play in modal epistemology, it also suggests that imagining cannot provide us with any non-modal knowledge about the world in which we live. In this talk, Kind rejects this latter suggestion. Offering an account of imagining that I call "imagining under constraints,” she provides a framework for showing when and how an imaginative project can play a justificatory role with respect to our beliefs about the world. That we can be free in our imaginings does not show that they must proceed unfettered; as she argues, our ability to constrain our imaginings in light of facts about the world enables us to learn from them. The important upshot is that the imagination has considerably more epistemic significance than previously thought. Free and open to the public.