Narratives and Thought Experiments

Imagination is typically invoked in accounting for our interaction with narratives. This idea has been recently undermined by Derek Matravers, who argues that consumers of narratives reason through manipulating mental models rather than through imagination. This point finds a nice parallelism in the debate on thought experiments. An influential account of the cognitive mechanisms underlying thought experimentation, the model-based approach, has it that the reasoning employed in thought experiments is closely related to the one used in the consumption of narratives and is based on mental models, which simulate the situations described in thought experimental narratives. Relying on a prominent view of imagination as a simulative attitude, this chapter distinguishes imagination from mental models by arguing that they are different kinds of phenomenon involving different kinds of mental simulation. The twofold aim is to show that Matravers appeals to a questionable definition of imagination and that the model-based approach fails to recognise the important role of imagination in thought experiments. The proposed view restores imagination to its pivotal role in our interactions with (fictional and non-fictional) narratives, including those involved in thought experiments. The resulting account opens the way for an analysis of the epistemic roles that imagination plays in science and the arts.