Knowledge Through Imagination

April 19-21, 2012

Imagination allows us to augment or even escape our mundane experiences of the actual world.  As children, we use the imagination to transform ordinary objects into forts and castles and ordinary people into alien creatures and monstrous animals. As adults, we turn to imaginative daydreams as administrators drone on in meetings. And at any age, our imaginings enable us to lose ourselves in fantastical stories. But it would be a mistake to regard imagination as completely divorced from worldly concerns, for imagination seems an essential ingredient in myriad ways of learning about the world.  It is by way of the imagination that we discover what could or must be.  Our views about rightness and wrongness are informed by our imaginings.  These imaginings also teach us about human nature and facilitates our understanding of, and empathy with, other creatures.  It illuminates new discoveries and augments our memories of the past.

But how can the same mental power that allows us to escape the world also tell us about what is?  Hence the question that motivates this conference:  How can we have knowledge through imagination?  This conference aims to address this question by investigating the many different domains in which we come to know by imagining – including (among others) emotional knowledge, aesthetic knowledge, knowledge of other minds, and modal knowledge.