Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 5th, 2010
A robust and celebrated fact is that imagining that p is often in various respects similar to believing that p. For example, when I imagine, say in the context of engaging with a fiction, that a great injustice has been committed, I feel angry in a way similar to the way I’d feel if I [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 29th, 2010
Let us suppose that Dmitri knows how to sing the ”Il balen” cadenza from Verdi’s Il Trovatore. There’s a debate about whether Dmitri’s knowing how to sing the cadenza amounts to knowing some proposition. According to ‘intellectualists’, knowing how to X just is (to an approximation), knowing, for some w, that w is a way to X. [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 26th, 2010
Shaun Nichols writes: In addition to a pretense box, Stich and I propose a mechanism that supplies the pretense box with representations that initiate or embellish an episode of pretense, the “Script Elaborator”. This is required to explain the bizarre and creative elements that are evident in much pretend play. However, there are also much [...]
Posted in papers on Jul 21st, 2009
Is Imagination A Priori? Draft of 21 July, 2009. Will be subsumed into a longer piece. Sometimes, we come to new knowledge via imaginative processes; plausibly, sometimes, such imagination plays an indispensably warranting role. Is such a role for imagination inconsistent with the apriority of our new knowledge? Stephen Yablo has argued that a certain [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Dreaming, with Ernest Sosa. Forthcoming in The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Scepticism and the Imagination Model of Dreaming. (2008) The Philosophical Quarterly, 58 (232), July 2008: 519–527 doi:10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.546.x Penultimate draft; please refer to published version, available online here. Ernest Sosa has argued that the solution to dream skepticism lies in an understanding of dreams as imaginative experiences – when we dream, on this suggestion, we do [...]
Posted in papers, publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Dreaming and Imagination, (2009) Mind and Language, 24 (1), February 2009: 103-121. Please refer to published version, available online here. I argue, on philosophical, psychological, and neurophysiological grounds, that contrary to an orthodox view, dreams do not typically involve misleading sensations and false beliefs. I am thus in partial agreement with Colin McGinn, who has [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 7th, 2009
Stephen Yablo argues that knowledge of things like shapes, insofar as they depend on visual imagination, cannot be a priori. Here is one of his arguments: [S]ome imagined reactions are a better guide to real reactions than others. Imagined shape reactions are a good guide, you say, and you are probably right. But it is [...]