EGENIS seminar: "When Having a Skill is Having Understanding: A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemology of Scientific Imagination" Dr Michael Stuart (University of York)
Egenis seminar series
Imagination plays important epistemic roles in science. For example, scientists use it to test traditional constraints, escape unhelpful perspectives, and determine the pursuitworthiness of ideas. There are different ways to capture the epistemic contributions of imagination, e.g., we can think of it as a more or less reliable process, or as an epistemic virtue, or as a kind of mental action which can have good or bad epistemic consequences.
| An Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences seminar | |
|---|---|
| Date | 17 March 2025 |
| Time | 15:30 to 17:00 |
| Place | Hybrid |
Event details
In this talk, I want to try out a new way to account for the epistemology of imagination. Some philosophers in the literature on imagination portray imagination as a skill, as something that can be trained and improved. Meanwhile, philosophers in the literature on understanding claim that there is a special kind of understanding called “pragmatic” or “practical” understanding, which consists in having skills or abilities. Drawing these together, a question arises: If imagination is a skill, can having a good imagination itself count as having understanding? If so, what would that understanding be of? I will argue that having imaginative skill can indeed count as having understanding, and that understanding is of certain affordance-spaces. This idea will be explored in the context of some examples of imagination used in recent projects carried out by the European Space Agency.
Venue: Byrne House, Streatham Campus (numbers limited)
Virtual: via Zoom
