Philosophers reframe imagination as a learnable skill, not innate talent
A new framework treats imagination as a dual-process intellectual virtue that can be trained and assessed for reliability—similar to how we evaluate judgment or expertise. The finding reshapes how organizations might develop creative problem-solving capabilities and offers clearer criteria for when to trust imaginative thinking in high-stakes decisions.
Originaltitel: The consequences of seeing imagination as a dual‐process virtue
<p>Michael T. Stuart (2021 and 2022) has proposed imagination as an intellectual dual-process virtue, consisting of imagination<sub>1</sub> (underwritten by cognitive Type 1 processing) and imagination<sub>2</sub> (supported by Type 2 processing). This paper investigates the consequences of taking such an account seriously. It proposes that the dual-process view of imagination allows us to incorporate recent insights from virtue epistemology, providing a fresh perspective on how imagination can be epistemically reliable. The argument centers on the distinction between General Reliability (GR) and Functional System Reliability (FSR), for example in relation to Kengo Miyazono and Uko Tooming's (2023) argument for epistemic generativity. Furthermore, the paper claims that the dual-process virtue account enables us to integrate a wide range of findings from the literature on epistemology and imagination. Moreover, it suggests a novel way to distinguish the virtues of creativity and imagination and presents a case for viewing imagination as a virtue rather than a skill.</p>