Imaginative Thought

I suggest that the imagination is the engine of the mind. Its power can be illustrated in several domains that otherwise may seem quite disparate. I start first with moral decision making. Experimental results show the power of our imagination in bringing about immediate change in our moral judgments. Even actions we consider completely morally unacceptable can become neutralised. The impact of the moral imagination has many consequences, including its effects on our ability to understand other people’s perspectives and their sometimes false beliefs. Next, I turn to causal reasoning. Experimental results show that the entertainment of counterfactual possibilities drives our causal explanations, even though causal and counterfactual explanations can have very different content. The impact of the causal imagination has many consequences including its effects on our ability to understand decisions made by Artificial Intelligence decision support systems. In the final section, I consider the mechanics of the imagination and the cognitive processes that underlie the mental simulation of alternatives to reality. Experimental results show that we construct mental models to represent the meaning of a counterfactual conditional. Our imagination of multiple possibilities has many consequences, including its effects on counterfactual inferences.