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The Productive Anarchy of Scientific Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michael T. Stuart
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Abstract

Imagination is important for many things in science: solving problems, interpreting data, designing studies, and much else. Philosophers of imagination typically account for the productive role played by imagination in science by focusing on how imagination is constrained, for example, by self-imposed rules to infer logically or model events accurately. But the constraints offered by these philosophers constrain either too much or not enough, and they can never account for uses of imagination that are needed to break today’s constraints in order to make progress tomorrow. Thus, epistemology of imagination needs to make room for an element of epistemological anarchy.

Type
Understanding and Imagination
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 87 , Issue 5: PSA 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II Symposia Papers , December 2020 , pp. 968 - 978
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank the audience of our PSA symposium on scientific imagination for helpful feedback and my fellow symposiasts Steven French, Alice Murphy, and Fiora Salis for their ongoing support, friendship, and detailed comments on the article. I would also like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for funding (grant PZ00P1_179986).

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