Abstract

I take issue with recent enthusiasm for the alleged epistemic powers of imagination and argue that imagination cannot generate knowledge and justification. I distinguish two conceptions of imagination that have emerged from recent debates: primitivism, according to which imagination is sui generis and essentially sensory or imagistic, vs. reductionism, according to which imagination is akin to other psychological states and “propositional” or non-necessarily imagistic. Both conceptions are problematic. Sensory imagination has been shown to be largely unreliable; besides, it doesn’t play either a necessary or sufficient role for knowledge. Propositional imagination, on the other hand, seems virtually indistinguishable from inferential reasoning, hence it’s unclear that it can yield distinctively imaginative justification. The issue reflects a broader dilemma for candidate accounts of the imagination and its epistemic powers: either imagination is primitive and sui generis but epistemically suspect; or it's reducible to more familiar inferential processes but lacks independent epistemic power.