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About a week ago, Ann Arbor had its annual art fair. (Blogging about the past will be commonplace as I recount summer happenings.) Well, there are actually 4 different art fairs. Basically, the town is turned into a big outdoors gallery, with some festival atmosphere. I can see how drivers would find the closing of the streets extremely annoying, but I think I had a good time overall. Not surprisingly, everything was rather expensive. But I did go to a free demonstration of silkscreening where I made shirts that said ‘Go Grue’. Very dorky of me, but fun.
Since I can hardly afford their works, I thought I would link to some artists whose work I liked and whose business cards I remembered to ask for:
- Gabe Lanza: cartoon-inspired multimedia.
- Chris Honeysett: photography.
- Maria Gruber: photography.
- Maria Napoli: color-field oil paintings.
Recently I have been reading Ruth Byrne’s book The Rational Imagination (2005). The book turned out less relevant to the things I am interested in. To make sure it wasn’t a total waste though, I would like to raise a worry I have with the general argumentative strategy of the book.
The Rational Imagination is really two books in one. The descriptive book summarizes many interesting results of the psychology experiments Byrne and her associates have done on how people’s counterfactual reasoning tends to be influenced. When thinking about how things might be different, people tend to focus on short-term consequences of actions, long-term consequences of inactions, controllable events, and enabling (as opposed to causal) relations. Ch. 3-7 presents interesting empirical results that should be of interest to philosophers interested in modal epistemology. The normative book promises to argue that counterfactual reasoning is rational, but I am not sure she delivers on this promise. I will raise a worry for her argument, and from that, suggest some things she would need to explain in order to spell out a more complete theory of rationality for counterfactual reasoning.
The stated overarching argument of the book is as follows (208):
1. Humans are capable of rational thought.
2. The principles that underlie rational thought guide the sorts of possibilities that people think about.
3. These principles underlie counterfactual imagination.
C. Counterfactual imagination is rational.
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