Publication
Title
Situated imagination
Author
Abstract
Imagination is often considered the pinnacle of representational cognition. Looking at the concrete details of imagining in context, this paper aims to contribute to the emerging literature that is challenging this representational view by offering a relational and radically situated alternative. On the basis of observing architects in the process of making an architectural art installation, we show how to consider imagination not as de-contextualized achievement by an individual but as an opening up to larger-scale “affordances,” i.e. the unfolding possibilities for action. We show how the architects coordinate the enactment of multiple affordances across different timescales, from small-scale affordances of picking up a mobile phone to the large-scale affordance of making the installation that takes months to unfold. These affordances get co-determined as they are jointly enacted. It is within this determining process that imagination too finds its place. On our view it is the indeterminacy of multiple affordances unfolding in action simultaneously that can be experienced as imaginative. The indeterminate character of this coordinative process allows activities to widen and open up, letting new possibilities for action enter into them.
Language
English
Source (journal)
Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. - Dordrecht, 2002, currens
Publication
New york : Springer , 2020
ISSN
1568-7759 [print]
1572-8676 [online]
DOI
10.1007/S11097-020-09701-2
Volume/pages
p. 1-23
ISI
000565827100001
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
Full text (open access)
UAntwerpen
Faculty/Department
Research group
Project info
AFFORDS-HIGHER: Skilled Intentionality for 'Higher' Embodied Cognition: Joining forces with a field of affordances in flux
Thinking in practice: a unified ecological-enactive account
Publication type
Subject
Affiliation
Publications with a UAntwerp address
External links
Web of Science
Record
Identifier
Creation 04.09.2020
Last edited 03.12.2024
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