Imagination and Understanding

Joshua Myers (York University)

Zoom link is available on request. Please email Sarah Murdoch ([email protected]) to receive it.

Understanding is a valuable epistemic achievement. But what sort of mental state is one in when one possesses understanding? The dominant view says that understanding is wholly grounded in doxastic states such as beliefs. Against this orthodoxy, I will argue that understanding isn’t just a matter of what one believes, but is also a matter of what one can imagine. More specifically, I will leverage a variety of intuitive, theoretical, and explanatory considerations to motivate and defend the imaginative model of understanding, according to which there are states of understanding that are at least partially grounded in capacities for sensory imagination. The result is a powerful and comprehensive account of understanding that brings the literatures on the epistemology of understanding and the epistemology of imagination into conversation with each other.