Washington & Jefferson College professor Hanna Kim will give a talk titled "The Content-Dependence of Imaginative Resistance" at 3:30 p.m. Friday, February 7, in Humanities and Social Sciences Building, room 117.
All are welcome to attend.
Abstract:
"An observation of Hume's has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with solutions' to this so-called Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance'.
Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a puzzle' to be solved."