What is your understanding of ‘Applied Philosophy’ ?

The line between applied philosophy and non-applied philosophy is pretty fuzzy. Most philosophy bears indirectly on practical questions, but that indirect road can be pretty long: abstract discussions about skepticism and the structure of justification will tell us something about justification, and one’s account of justification might (might!) eventually bear on some practical question. I think of applied philosophy as simply philosophy that begins with a direct focus on issues of practical concern, from societal-level public issues like incarceration or vaccine mandates, to private issues like dating or child-rearing practices. From that point there isn’t a single way that the philosophizing has to go. It could be just trying to analyze a phenomenon of contemporary concern. For example, all our recent experiences with quarantine might make us wonder, “What is introversion?” Other applied philosophy might try to apply established theories to some areas of our everyday lives. For instance, I’ve got an idea that I want to run by Shawn Klein about applying Kendall Walton’s imagination-based theory of art to sports fandom. Still other applied philosophy might try to incorporate empirical research to construct non-idealized theories that we can apply to real cases. Some of my research on the rules of rationality that I describe below might fall into that category.

How does your research relate to Applied Philosophy? Tell us a little more about some of your work

I have two areas of focus for my research. One is imagination. Imagination was once a neglected area in philosophy, but it’s growing. I’m interested in the ways that imagination helps us decide what to do or how to live. We use imagination a lot in our “what if…?” thinking, when we consider how our various plans might play out. But we have to be careful: if we want these imaginings to be helpful, we can’t let these imaginings run wild. After all, we use imagination to concoct fantastical stories. We don’t want planning to devolve into wish fulfilling fictionalizing. So when we use imagination for practical purposes like planning and “what if…” thinking there have to be constraints. I’m interested in understanding those constraints.

My second area of research is epistemology. I began my career focused on foundational questions about the nature of justification and responses to skepticism. I’m now more interested in epistemological questions that bear more directly on everyday decisions and actions. A current example is a paper I’m writing on how strict the rules of rationality are, and whether given a body of evidence the rules of rationality dictate a unique answer. That might seem abstract, but here’s an example that shows how it bears fairly directly on real world issues: grading. When your professor grades your paper, do the rules of rationality dictate that there is a unique rational grade to assign? Or can more than one grade be rational? Of course we know that different professors might look for different qualities in a paper, and rationally assign different grades as a result. But what about a single professor with a single rubric and a single grading standard: can more than one grade be rationally permissible?

Thinking back to your early academic career, what made you realize philosophy was the right choice for you?

My undergraduate major was computer science & engineering. As an engineer, I think I had a total of like six electives over the course of my undergraduate career. I took an intro philosophy course in my first year at my dad’s suggestion and found that it really fit with the way I approached problems, and so I took a few more courses. But I finished my CSE major and went to work for a consulting company as a programmer. It was only after I had worked for about five years that I thought about going back to school. Programming was fun, but I was interested in taking a (what I thought would be) short break to broaden my horizons before I moved up the corporate ladder. I applied to some liberal studies MA programs and, because of those philosophy courses I took as an undergrad, a few philosophy MA programs. I got into a good MA program, and found a great friend in the PhD program who was also a great mentor. (Can’t overstate the importance of finding a good mentor!) That’s when I started seriously thinking about pursuing philosophy.

Any philosopher or school of thought that inspires you the most or stands out? Recommended readings for our readers

Some readers may not have encountered Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe, which lays out an imagination-based theory of art. Artworks are props in imaginative games of make-believe. I read that book in graduate school and it blew my mind. It’s eminently readable yet still detailed and thorough, with lots of wonderful examples. At the time I read it, I’d never seen anything like it.

I had read many of her papers before, but I’m now reading Laurie Paul’s Transformative Experience, which explains how difficult it is to understand and plan for experiences that will change us dramatically. In part, this book details failures of imagination. One example Paul uses in the book is having children. Before you have children, can you imagine what it will be like to be a parent. Paul argues that you can’t with any accuracy, and as a father of three I must admit that she is right. I will be teaching a seminar on transformative experience next year.

One of the things that’s notable about philosophy of imagination is that you see people from a lot of traditionally underrepresented groups working on imagination. You can see this in the list of contributors to a blog on imagination run by my former colleague Amy Kind. It’s called The Junkyard, and it’s definitely worth checking out.

Imagination for many might be an abstract idea that is closer to creativity and idealism as opposed to reality. Do our imaginative capacities hold value outside of the stereotypical perspective on imagination?

We certainly use imagination in creative endeavors, in particular as a way of escaping from reality. Imagination’s power to generate fictional stories, daydreams, and fantasies seem virtually unbounded

But I think we have some control over how we use imagination. We can deploy imagination in different “modes,” and one mode is deliberately constrained by reality. For example, there’s flood irrigation in my neighborhood (though not in my house). Say I’m trying to decide whether I can jump across a flooded portion of my neighbor’s lawn. To decide, I might imagine jumping, and then “see” whether I make it. Of course I can imagine that I jump 55 feet, or that I float effortlessly over the puddle, or that the puddle shrinks to the size of a quarter as I jump. But none of that is particularly useful. So I can constrain my imagination to operative more realistically, and if I do so, my imagined jump will give me a reasonable (but defeasible) approximation of what would happen if I jumped. There’s a lot of work in the imagination literature these days that looks at the kinds of constraints that we deliberately can put on our imagination to make imagination practically useful.

For Sartre nothing can be learned from an image that is not already known.

Does imagination play a strong epistemic role in helping us acquire new knowledge or is Sartre right?

I’ve already discussed how imagination can be a route to knowledge. When we deploy imagination under reality-based constraints, then it seems like it can help us answer “what if…?” questions, and that’s of course a key kind of practical knowledge. Another way that imagination might allow us to gain new knowledge is in modeling. We use imagination to construct models, and the models help us gain new insight. There’s a sense that Sartre is right, particularly when we deploy imagination deliberately: we decide what goes into our imagining. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from it, both from the process of constructing the image or by examining the image. Think about the comparison with writing: there’s a sense in which your writing is a reflection of what you already know. You decide what goes on the page. But of course you can learn a lot in the process of writing, and you can also learn by reflecting on things that you have already written.

Where do you see imagination when we talk about morality and empathy? Is imagination at the crux of empathy and in turn shaping our morality?

This is an important area of current research, because there’s empirical work suggesting that we are not very good at using imagination to project how others will react, or even how our future selves will react. Daniel Gilbert has a lot of work in this area. It’s very natural to think that empathetic imagination is crucial to understanding others’ situations, and hence to our moral thinking about others. But the situation is not so straightforward, because that natural thought depends on us being reasonably accurate at empathetic projection, and it isn’t clear that we are. Laurie Paul’s book on transformative experience is an extreme version of this worry. Before I have kids, I can’t imaginatively empathize with my future parent self -- it’s just too different. But then that raises a similar worry in non-transformative cases about empathizing with people who are different from us. The natural thought remains, but it is subject to a lot of fascinating challenges.

Peter Kung is an associate professor of philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies. Kung's principal area of interest is in the imagination, and in particular how imagination can confer justification or knowledge, and how imagination figures in the methodology of philosophy. He has co-edited a volume on imagination, with Amy Kind, "Knowledge Through Imagination" (Oxford University Press, 2016). He also has research interests in epistemology, where he is interested in the foundations of justification and in the interaction between rationality and bias.

Interview conducted by Areesha Hassan.

November, 2021