Because Imagination it is not based on definitions and constraints, and because it is primarily an intrapsychological process that consists of microfragments of image making whose meaning and purpose is emergent, one does not usually associate the word “pragmatic” with the imagination. But it is precisely because the imagination is given permission to play without pragmatic intent that it finds connections between things that are not obvious or easy. It finds correspondences that the reasoning mind might never see, and might find unlikely. It plays with boundaries. It lets thoughts and partial thoughts jump fences. While not purposeful by intent, or pragmatic by nature, it is precisely this kind of activity that has pragmatic possibility in a world that is rapidly changing and radically contingent.
To understand how, we first need to develop a working theory of the imagination that looks at how the image-forming capacity of the human mind contributes to work in diverse cognitive contexts, from the most routine to the most radical.
Within the work of the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, known for founding the cultural-historical vein of twentieth-century cognitive psychology, perception is seen as a process of triangulation between the subject (the individ- ual in the world), the object or experience encountered, and the mediation of that relationship through cultural frames and behaviors.
Mental images we form are not the same as one-to-one representations of a sensed world. They are socio- cultural-biological constructs from the very beginning. What one sees, be it object or experience, is perceived through lenses that work to make sense of that object or experience in terms known to the individual as a culturally embedded entity.
Imagination then is “the process of resolving and connecting the fragmented, poorly coordinated experience of the world so as to bring about a stable image of the world (and) a feeling of oneself in relation to the world.”
perception is a process of triangulation that makes sense self-other-world the mind is an organ of perception
they are differently experienced because they are differently mediated processes of human cognition.
The imagination is primarily an intrapsychological process, occurring in the brain on a temporal scale of microseconds, and ending when a resolution between an individual’s experience, and the internal image that it calls forth, emerges. Creativity is a process that is part of a social domain of action. It operates on a longer time scale — a sociohistorical time scale — and ends when an image becomes embodied as something that enters the world of social relations — a world with a history.
What is primary and irreducible to creativity is that it effects a change in the world, no matter how small, by introducing something new. That something new has the capacity to “effect social and cultural change in the world of reciprocity, norms, laws, knowledge, and institutions.”
Imagination, on the other hand, is an internalized domain that affects mostly the development of the individual as a social cultural form of life.
So “what distinguishes creativity from imagina- tion are the temporalities [microfragments of experience, as opposed to cultural time] and domains of development [development of the individual, versus the development of society and culture].”
Because one is principally responsible to the “development of society and culture,” while the other is principally an “intrapsychological process,” creativity and the imagination have very different relationships to definitions and con- straints. Creative activity aims to do something purposeful, and so it is always aware of the definitions and constraints of the world around it. From material constraints, to cultural, to legal, economic, or political constraints, and whether honoring or challenging them, creativity values constraints. The imagination is not definition and constraint-based because it does not seek to produce a connected set of actions that aim at a specific result.
Creative activity aims to do something purposeful. The imagination is some- thing that emerges. While creativity works toward products that exist in the real world and have real world purpose, the product of the imagination is the “imag- ined object;” it is the image itself. That image comes with meaning, but any purpose it contains is that which one derives from it as it intersects with other cognitive processes.
Imagination then is “the process of resolving and connecting the frag- mented, poorly coordinated experience of the world so as to bring about a stable image of the world (and) a feeling of oneself in relation to the world.”22
We suggest that this spectrum is a continuum, as opposed to three separate cognitive-imaginative steps, because within “reasoning,” we can further distin- guish different processes which the imagination serves differently: deductive reasoning, in which a conclusion follows directly from the premises presented; inductive reasoning, in which the conclusion, while supported by the premises, does not directly follow them because there are missing pieces; and abductive reasoning, which is often understood as a “best guess” hypothetical reasoning — a form of logical inference in which an observation leads to a hypothesis which might explain the observation. The hypothesis can then be tested. In abduction, one is seeking the simplest and most likely explanation, without enough facts for a foothold on certainty.
in one story, Holmes confesses out loud to his “love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of life.”31 But, at the same time, he embraced the modern world of science as a way to make sense of the “bizarre,” and modern life with its “strange effects and extraordinary combinations.”3
imagination they will not connect themselves together in any rational way.”37 “The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight”38 that emerges from the matrix of experience, itself, from “perceptual judgments.” Like Holmes, and as a “movement which sought to clarify meaning in terms of action,” the pragmatists embraced abductive reasoning as a form of think- ing in action that required the mind’s capacity to imagine. But also as a movement that saw action and meaning as a vital exchange, they understood the world in terms of continuity and development; that is to say, they considered every act and all meaning to be part of possible future acts and future meanings, as well as past and present. The imagination then, is a speculative faculty necessary to scaffold action and understanding.
For Dewey, doing things in the real world leads to knowledge of the real world, and in fact, we can only build knowledge by actions in the real world. We learn about an object by using that object, or we learn about a context by working in that context. “Knowing and doing are indivisible aspects of the same process.”
The action that drives knowledge building can be spontaneous — serendip- itous — but it can also be driven by inquiry. “What motivates us to action is in some sense a query: a problem, a question, a provocative insight, or a trouble- some situation. It is productive because it aims to produce an answer, solution, or resolution.”
“there is no knowledge unmediated by inquiry.”
inquiry, by nature, makes use of the full spectrum of reasoning processes — deduction, induction and abduction — all of which rely on perception and the imagination in different capacities and with different functions.
“Imagination is a condition for any intelligent action,” and it “emerges as a thoroughly temporal or modally complex event: it arises in an ongoing activity already structured by the fundamental nar- rativity of any act (that of having a beginning, middle, and end) but it also arises in consciousness as a crisis of that activity, carrying within itself the contradiction between what is and what ought to be.”
it's a continous lookout for affordance in the things around.
For the pragmatists, how we understand things and situations is now viewed in light of speculative possibilities. Even a thing, such as a table, is not viewed as simply a horizontal surface, but a horizontal surface with multiple possible future actions/uses embedded in it.
Because “the meaning of action in pragmatism involved a recognition of the importance of a mode of understanding whereby the actual was reinterpreted and reconstructed in the light of the possible,”49 and because the main developers of pragmatism “were sensitive to the creative, the temporal, and the experimen- tal dimensions of experience,”50 the process by which humans come to terms with the world is radically different from the traditional polarized view of either reasoning or imagination.
While being “a dynamic, ‘embodied’ view, beginning with the idea of living organic beings acting and learning in a world,” it now “consciously involves a metaphysical standpoint in which speculation integrates the ontological modalities of actuality and potentiality.” In other words, one understands what is by using the imagination to generate possibilities of what could be . Everything and experience is understood from two temporal perspectives — both what it actually is in the here and now, and the possibilities the imagination allows us to see in it. And this is a way of being in the world, as well as a way of learning about the world.
Therefore, in pragmatism, the imagination is both synthetic and generative. It contributes a new classification to our spectrum of the role of the imagination in cognitive processes. Extending beyond abduction as an imaginative effort of reasoning, where speculation is a vehicle for problem solving, now speculation becomes a vehicle for seeing the actual in terms of the possible. By generating a whole host of potential versions of what is present today, it drives inquiry, which drives action, which in turn drives knowledge-building that leads back to action.
In Dewey’s concept of the moral imagination, the imagination has two functions.
Related to empathic-projection
It works for empathetic projection. Imagining ourselves in the shoes of others, we pause to explore their aspirations, interests, and fears — to see through their eyes in order to broaden the context of decision making.
Related to latent-potential, impossible-but-possible, adjacent-possible the-third-door being-convivial-is-a-human-only-potential
And the imagination works to creatively tap a situation’s possibilities. Overcoming the inertia of habit, it allows us to imagine possible outcomes that are different from what might already be set in motion. Imaginative activity ventures beyond restatement of convention to grasp undisclosed opportunities and to generate new ideals and ends.Ideals and ends that are ethically focused and morally secured through concrete actions within everyday life and learning.
Moral deliberation through "dramatic rehearsal"
The two — empathy and creatively imagining possibilities — work together as moral deliberation through Dewey’s concept of “dramatic rehearsal,” in which one plays the consequences of a particular possibility through, as if it were real.
“Deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in one’s imagination) of various com- peting possible lines of action. . . . (It) is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. . . . Thought runs ahead and fore- sees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and disaster. An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable.”
Its like in the Mavel movie Avengers where the one with the superpower to use time looks for a moral outcome.
Milan Kundera, the Czech-born writer, once wrote: “A novel examines not reality, but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility.”
For the British design team of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, “the purpose of speculation is to unsettle the present rather than predict the future.”
And now we are in the realm of the civic imagination, which Henry Jenkins defines as “the capacity to imagine alternatives to current social, political or economic institutions or problems.” The Institute for the Future calls this “imaginative citizenship,” and articulates the need for a public imagination: “Any democracy requires a thriving public imagination in order to make visible, sharable, and understandable to all the people new ideas, new models, new potential poli- cies.”
Not thinking about the problem, he would find himself in other states in which “ideas rose in crowds, I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.”
Remembering that images can be visual, auditory, or motor, the experimental imagination is about forming images in action; in other words, while engaged in doing something that is driven by curiosity and fueled by an aspiration for novelty, whether it is a novel scientific solution, or a piece of music that dares to try something no musician has tried before. The experimental imagination works off of an individual’s creative history, and the domain practices of the endeavor. It is scaffolded by knowledge and skills the individual has acquired through expe- rience. The experimental imagination functions in parallel to the doing; there is a resonant back and forth between them. And both emerge in unplanned and unforeseen ways.
The experimental imagination may be set in motion by a goal — something someone wants to achieve — a question, or just the urge to play with one’s tools. But no matter how it is set in motion, once operating, it develops a momentum that pushes the boundaries of the individual’s creative history. It plays at the edges of what they have done before. While working off of what one knows and what one knows how to do, it rejects the known and easy . It revels in boundary pushing and domain jumping.
Seemingly less disciplined, it is not without focus and rigor. Focus is provided by the question(s) under consideration, and rigor comes from the creative history of the individual — what they have already accomplished and learned, and can tacitly deploy in new creative activity.
is commitment an abtract concept over focus and rifgor? is commitment a whole that is more that these two parts? does it include soul? maybe the usefullness of commitment is in question?
As an agent to experimental boundary pushing, the experimental imagina- tion allows — demands — a wider range of play than one expects from the imagi- nations of perception, reasoning, or speculation.
When trying things out, the mind has to adapt to things discovered, and then goes on to try again. Trying things out in an emerging context of one’s own creating is what jazz musicians, comedians, and others call improvisation. Improvisation is the key spark for, and function of, the experimental imagination Different from reasoning or speculating, here the image-forming capacity of the mind reflects less, and contributes more, working from a rich bank of images and skills
While the experimental imagination serves one while engaged in activities and skills, functioning parallel to those activities, the imagination we associate with inspiration often functions when one stops focused activity. It is an imagi- nation of free play as opposed to experimental play. Experimental play is guided by the boundaries of the experimentation one is engaged in. Free play is guided by the act of playing itself, which sets its own terms as it goes along.
In both the experimental imagination and the imagination of free play, working off of Charles Limb’s research, we speculate that the self-critical and cen- soring parts of the brain are ‘turned off,’ while the autobiographical parts are activated.
We suggest that in the imagination of free play, one is not working off of one’s creative history, but a full range of autobiographical material. By autobiographical, we mean all the things one has uniquely experienced and assimilated as an individual embedded in a larger world.
We can also speculate that in the imagination of free play, because one is not engaged in an experimen- tal “train of thought,” the autobiographical material one mines as images is more random and less immediate, less current. As such, this imagination is “resolving images” that produce strange and uncanny associations — radically novel com- binations that come from unrestricted associations and emergent thoughts. And it does not settle on resolution too quickly, often shape-shifting many times in an instant.
The free play imagination does not subscribe to the boundaries of what one knows, or knows how to do. It is serendipitous, intuitive, and completely at home in not knowing why it sees what it sees. This is the imagination that “runs in the background” during waking hours, and dominates our dreaming.
Preferring to study the simpler components of human cognition, many neuroscientists dismiss this as ‘disordered thought’ because it does not tend to have the same linear pattern as ordered thought,
Concepts like free association or active-imagination how useful as portals to enter Free Play Imagination.
Further the study on brain in free association:
Her subjects were asked to describe the events of their day and then asked to engage in random silent thought. What she found was that during “randomly wandering unconscious free association,” the brain regions active were almost all association cortex, those areas “that are known to gather information from the senses and from elsewhere in the brain and link it all together.
These association regions are found in the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes. They are the last to mature in human beings. They continue to develop new connections up to around the early twenties. They are also much larger in human beings than in other higher primates. . . . They receive input from primary sensory or motor regions, from subcortical regions such as the thalamus, and from one another. Presumably this organization is used to permit the brain’s owner to integrate the information he or she receives or possesses and to produce much of the activity that we refer to as “the unconscious mind.” Apparently, when the brain/mind thinks in a free and unencumbered fashion, it uses its most human and complex parts.
An hypothesis:
These introspective accounts are describing a process during which thought is not only nonsequential or nonlinear, but during which nonrational unconscious processes play a role. It is as if the multiple association cortices are communicating back and forth, not in order to integrate associations with sensory or motor input, as is often the case, but simply in response to one another. The associations are occurring freely, not sub- ject to any of the reality principles that normally govern them. I would hypothesize that during the creative process the brain begins by disorganizing. . . . Associative links run wild, creating new connections, many of which might seem strange or implausible. . . . Out of this disorganization, self-organization eventually emerges and takes over in the brain.
Obviously allied with the experimental imagination, what distinguishes the imagination of free play from the experimental imagination is its motivation. The experimental imagination starts with a question and/or an individual’s cre- ative practice and history. These serve as its center of gravity. Whether to make music, experiment with gestures in color on canvas, or wrestle with string theory, the experimental imagination honors the search in its focused play. The imagination of free play may be catalyzed by a question, but it needn’t be. It needs no center of gravity; in fact, it avoids a center of gravity, preferring to be lost in the play.
This seems to be similar to proj.inner-wayfinding and it's postures of merging (focused) and wanderin (play)
The free play imagination is after:
and ultimately, the free play imagination is after surprise and awe.
Lewis Hyde, the noted cultural theorist, characterizes this kind of imaginative activity as "disruptive lmagination." As "the embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox," he claims that it is exactly this kind of imaginative play that creates and evolves culture.
Along the spectrum, there is a moment when the role of the imagination shifts from creating understanding through synthetic, integrative, or even specula- tive reasoning, to generating new possible understandings, things, and futures; a shift from the integrative to the generative. This happens at the far edge of abduc- tive reasoning, where it begins to rely on the speculative imagination. Nancy Andreasen might characterize this from a neurological perspective as the brain shifting from organizing to disorganizing content-images, or from convergent to divergent activity.91
The left side of the role of imagination in cognitive processes spectrum is the integrative side, where imagination is principally in service of perception and reasoning, while the right side is where the imagination generates new possible understandings and truly novel things.
For our purposes, we would like to propose another term for the far right of the spectrum.
What is most often referred to as the “creative imagination” — the role that we associate with artistic creativity, fantasy, radical scientific discoveries, and invention and novelty of all sorts — can be renamed in terms of its generative capacity for novelty as the poïetic imagination.
Related to but different from the word “poetic,” poïetic comes from the classical Greek verb poïesis, which refers to actions of making that both continue and transform the world
NOTE: this looks related to christopher-alexander concept of structure-preserving-transformation. Though "structure preserving" implies more a service of perception and reasoning, ithink it also means a contact with fingerspitzengeühl to continuation.
Suffice it to say that the poïetic imagination is mostly involuntary. It emerges from within to be pushed out into the world. But without previous things perceived, there is little material to work from. Poïetic imagining requires the intertwining of images perceived with images one constructs. One can do work that builds image equity, prepares the mind, and then even urges it into drive.
As the most extreme form, the poïetic imagination is not as arbitrary as it seems. It is related to, and prepared by, our experiences in the world.
But its extreme generative power lies in its willingness to suspend disbelief — to play within a space unconstrained by normative logic where the gap between the famil- iar and the strange is expansive. This kind of generative impulse increases as one moves to the right along our “role of imagination in cognitive processes” spectrum.
We characterize the continuum we have mapped as a spectrum to appro- priate the nuances of the metaphor. A spectrum of light is a continuum of wave- lengths. However, it has different regions that are characterized as radio waves, microwaves, infrared waves, the visible portion of the spectrum, ultraviolet, x-ray, gamma waves. Within the visible range, there are smaller regions that separate light into seven discernible colors. And we know that those are not absolute, as these seven colors blend to form a multitude of hues. This is a valuable metaphor because the imagination also has many hues. Cognitive activity is a complex phenomenon influenced by a multitude of biological and environmental factors.
That the imagination serves diverse cognitive processes as an entire spec- trum of activity (not a polarization of “reasoning” versus “imagination”) is the first principle in our framework of the Pragmatic Imagination. We now turn to the second.
In their article “Minding the Gap: Imagination, Creativity, and Human Cognition,” authors E. Pelaprat, social science information theorist, and M. Cole, cognitive psychologist, draw on the work of L. S. Vygotsky and a series of experi- ments to illustrate and unpack how the imagination is a diversity of processes of image-making that “resolve gaps.”
So there is a gap in our experience that must somehow be resolved. Freud talked about the ego sitting between the it and the superego. A kind of cap that the ego filles. Here we say that gap is the result of "intermingling of direct and mediated version of an object of experience - the intermingling of pure sensation, and the sorting and structuring of images and concepts around those sensations." The imagination is called upon to "fill in" the difference. It as if the ego can be viewed as being imagination that filles the gap. That's a cool way to frame ego but unfortunately we forget that it's pragmatic imagination. So ego is pragmatic imagination drawing on the spectrum to play the flute.
The imagination is called upon to “fill in” the difference enough to generate a single image that one can operate on. This “single” image may be an integration of the two pathways, but in Pelaprat and Cole’s model, it need not be. It only needs to be “singular-enough for the individual to think or act.”. But importantly, the “singular enough image” that resolves the gap is an image that now replaces the direct experience.
"Replaces the direct experience". Wow thats how predictive-processing-model can be understood. Also we are continuously doing hermeneutics Also the coherence (same as singleton?) of the image must only be good-enough. So there can be contradiction?
In the Pelaprat and Cole model, filling gaps is seen as a continually recurring process, and so even an object that one perceives changes position and meaning in our understanding of it over time. Something strange, novel, or new, becomes familiar with use. But a special event or experience may map new meaning onto it. Objects and places develop patinas of meaning as we encounter them in different situations, but also as the subject, the person doing the encountering, evolves — as their frames mature, shift, or are disrupted. Each change in perception is the resolution of a new gap that is established.
The phrase "thought occurs over time" means to say that the gaps are made coherent over time. So there is a temporal aspect.
The Spectrum show directly of we can for with uncertainty and how it is instrinsic to experience. A good biomarker that the concept of uncertainty may induce would be aliveness.
This counter positioning of imagination versus reasoning has been with us from classical times, despite the attempts of many to expand our understanding of how imagination plays out within an entire field of cognitive operations. This polarization is counterproductive and scientifically unfounded. Instead, we need to understand the imagination as a critical partner in an entire spectrum of activity defined by diverse cognitive processes. Aristotle, saw the imagination as a necessary mediator between sensation and thought.
Somewhere at the edge of abductive reasoning where it blends into the domain of the speculative imagination, the imagination’s functioning shifts from sense-making to sense-breaking in order to generate novel content for consideration. It widens the gap to disrupt normative thought processes and practices. It is then also employed alongside reasoning to close the widened gap so that novel content can be assimilated.
The actual must always be seen in light of the possible.
The imagination must be instrumentalized to turn ideas into action.
The imagination must be instrumentalized to turn ideas into action— the entire spectrum of the imagination especially the generative/poietic/sometimes-disruptive side.
Because the imagination is not under conscious control, we need to understand, find, and design ways to set it in motion and scaffold it throughout meaningful activity.