Embodied simulation and knowledge of possibilities

We argue that our capacity to use imagination to acquire knowledge of objective possibilities should be explained in terms of the embodied nature of our imagination. Our imagination is able to be sufficiently reality oriented due to constraints that are a natural consequence of embodied simulation. That is, our bodies, shaped by their histories of interactions with the environment, can play a role in constraining the imagination so that it, sometimes, is epistemically useful. However, insofar as these constraints support our capacity to acquire knowledge of non-actual possibilities, this support is only likely to accrue for knowledge of relatively mundane and parochial possibilities, yet potentially detrimentally distorting when dealing with possibilities that are alien to our specific embodied ways of being. The cases where embodied constraints are likely to fail to provide epistemic support to the imagination include many of the kinds of thought experiment that are central to philosophers’ attempts to gain knowledge of possibilities. Thus, at least insofar as imagination is taken to play a central epistemic role in these cases, one should exercise a degree of modesty.