Imaginative Animals. Leibniz's Logic of Imagination

Through the reconstruction of Leibniz's theory of the degrees of knowledge, this e-book investigates and explores the intrinsic relationship of imagination with space and time. The inquiry into this relationship defines the logic of imagination that characterizes both human and non-human animals, albeit differently, making them two different species of imaginative animals. Lucia Oliveri explains how the emergence of language in human animals goes hand in hand with the emergence of thought and a different form of rationality constituted by logical inferences based on identity and contradiction, principles that are out of reach of the imagination. The e-book concludes that the presence of innate principles in human animals transforms the way in which they sense-perceive the world, thereby constantly increasing the distinction between human and non-human animals.

VOLUNTARY IMAGINATION: A FINE-GRAINED ANALYSIS

We study imagination as reality-oriented mental simulation (ROMS): the activity of simulating nonactual scenarios in one’s mind, to investigate what would happen if they were realized. Three connected questions concerning ROMS are: What is the logic, if there is one, of such an activity? How can we gain new knowledge via it? What is voluntary in it and what is not? We address them by building a list of core features of imagination as ROMS, drawing on research in cognitive psychology and the philosophy of mind. We then provide a logic of imagination as ROMS which models such features, combining techniques from epistemic logic, action logic, and subject matter semantics. Our logic comprises a modal propositional language with non-monotonic imagination operators, a formal semantics, and an axiomatization.

The Logic of Imagination

Imagination seems to have a logic, albeit one which is hyperintensional and sensitive to context. This chapter offers a semantics of imagination, with operators expressing ‘imaginative acts’ of mental simulation. A number of conditions that could be imposed on the semantics are then discussed, in order to validate certain inferences. One important issue is how acts of imagination interact with disjunction: one can imagine some disjunction as obtaining without being imaginatively specific about which disjunction obtains. This chapter subsequently turns to non-monotonicity: how B may follow from imagining that A, but not from imagining that A ∧ C. Finally, the Principle of Imaginative Equivalents is discussed.