Among the tools the epistemologist brings to the table ought to be, I suggest, a firm understanding of the imagination--one that is informed by philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. In my dissertation, I highlight several ways in which such an understanding of the imagination can yield insight into traditional questions in epistemology. My dissertation falls into three parts.
In Part I, I argue that dreaming should be understood in imaginative terms, and that this has important implications for questions about dream skepticism. In Part II, I argue that an understanding of the imagination is important for understanding important parts of philosophical methodology--particularly those involving thought experiments. I mean in Part II to be vindicating a great deal of traditional methodology. In Part III, I explore what I take to be a number of deep connections between knowledge and counterfactuals. I defend a form of contextualism in each domain, and argue that inference among imaginings, with its important structural similarities to inference in belief, plays a central role in the epistemology of counterfactuals.
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-173).
Subject (ID = SUBJ1); (authority = RUETD)
Topic
Philosophy
Subject (ID = SUBJ2); (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Imagination (Philosophy)
Subject (ID = SUBJ3); (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Knowledge, Theory of
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Title
Graduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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Identifier (type = doi)
doi:10.7282/T39C6XR0
Genre (authority = ExL-Esploro)
ETD doctoral
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Jonathan Ichikawa
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Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
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