Core Imagination

This paper argues that imagination constrained by core cognition yields modal knowledge of the sort of quotidian possibilities at issue in everyday life. But are core constraints of the right strength to generate the relevant possibilities? We turn to naturalistic resources to answer that question. Recent psychological results show that children and adults judge violations of core cognitive constraints impossible. Modal semantics suggests that violations of these constraints aren’t possible in the quotidian senses of ‘possible’ at issue in everyday life. Together, these psychological and semantic considerations suggest that core constraints are of the right strength to generate the relevant possibilities. Some philosophers might seek to impose the additional requirement that core constraints block every impossible situation. However, we think that matters are more complex. First, core constraints are a proper subset of the constraints to imagination. Peripheral constraints block lots of the impossible situations. Second, imaginative constraints (core or peripheral) aren’t sufficient to block every impossible situation. Rather, contextual beliefs block lots of the relevant quotidian impossibilities. We conclude that our discussion is of wider methodological interest as it implements a naturalistic methodological approach that appeals to core cognition, modal psychology, and modal semantics to investigate modal knowledge acquisition.