Situated imagination
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Situated imagination Ludger van Dijk 1
& Erik
Rietveld 2,3,4
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Imagination is often considered the pinnacle of representational cognition. Looking at the concrete details of imagining in context, this paper aims to contribute to the emerging literature that is challenging this representational view by offering a relational and radically situated alternative. On the basis of observing architects in the process of making an architectural art installation, we show how to consider imagination not as de-contextualized achievement by an individual but as an opening up to larger-scale “affordances,” i.e. the unfolding possibilities for action. We show how the architects coordinate the enactment of multiple affordances across different timescales, from small-scale affordances of picking up a mobile phone to the large-scale affordance of making the installation that takes months to unfold. These affordances get codetermined as they are jointly enacted. It is within this determining process that imagination too finds its place. On our view it is the indeterminacy of multiple affordances unfolding in action simultaneously that can be experienced as imaginative. The indeterminate character of this coordinative process allows activities to widen and open up, letting new possibilities for action enter into them. Keywords Affordances . Ecological psychology . Enaction . Embodied cognition .
Imagination . Skilled intentionality framework . “Higher” cognition
* Ludger van Dijk [email protected] * Erik Rietveld [email protected]
1
Centre for Philosophical Psychology, Department of Philosophy, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
2
Amsterdam University Medical Center, Department of Psychiatry, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
3
Department of Philosophy/ILLC, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
4
Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
L. van Dijk, E. Rietveld
In order to see more clearly, here as in countless similar cases, we must focus on the details of what goes on; must look at them from close to. (Wittgenstein 1953 §51)
1 Introduction Radically situated approaches to cognition have slowly been gaining momentum. After modern enactive and ecological theories made headway in areas such as perception and “basic” activities (Chemero 2009; Hutto and Myin 2013) and developed the notion of “affordances” to extend to sociomaterial practices (Gibson 1979; Costall 1995; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; Heft 2007), they have recently started to approach imagination in non-representational terms (Gallagher 2017; Hutto and Myin 2017; Ingold 2013; Rucińska 2016; Van Rooij et al. 2002). The basic scheme to account for imagination has two ingredients, neither of which is sufficient by itself. First, there is the history of prior situated activity that sets up the individual with the appropriate sensitivities (Gibson 1979, p. 255 ff.; Hutto and Myin 2017, p. 195). Second, this history is ongoing and continued in
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