Byrne/The Rational Imagination: BBS Call for Commentators

Dear Dr. Qwerty, ================================================================== BBS MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW -- CALL RESPONSE INSTRUCTIONS ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the new Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Byrne-04032… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. * Please respond to this Call no later than May 14, 2007 NOTE: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ================================================================== ** Multiple Book Review Information ** ================================================================== Below is a link to the forthcoming précis of a book accepted for Multiple Book Review in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS). Please note that it is the *BOOK*, not the precis, that is to be reviewed. PRECIS OF: The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality AUTHOR: Ruth M. J. Byrne, Trinity College Dublin ABSTRACT: The human imagination remains one of the last uncharted terrains of the mind. People often imagine how events might have turned out ‘if only’ something had been different. The ‘fault lines’ of reality, those aspects more readily changed, indicate that counterfactual thoughts are guided by the same principles as rational thoughts. In the past, rationality and imagination have been viewed as opposites. But research has shown that rational thought is more imaginative than cognitive scientists had supposed. In The Rational Imagination, I argue that imaginative thought is more rational than scientists have imagined. People exhibit remarkable similarities in the sorts of things they change in their mental representation of reality when they imagine how the facts could have turned out differently. For example, they tend to imagine alternatives to actions rather than inactions, events within their control rather than those beyond their control, and socially unacceptable events rather than acceptable ones. Their thoughts about how an event might have turned out differently lead them to judge that a strong causal relation exists between an antecedent event and the outcome, and their thoughts about how an event might have turned out the same lead them to judge that a weaker causal relation exists. In a simple temporal sequence, people tend to imagine alternatives to the most recent event. The central claim in the book is that counterfactual thoughts are organized along the same principles as rational thought. The idea that the counterfactual imagination is rational depends on three steps: humans are capable of rational thought; they make inferences by thinking about possibilities; and their counterfactual thoughts rely on thinking about possibilities, just as rational thoughts do. The sorts of possibilities that people envisage explain the mutability of certain aspects of mental representations and the immutability of other aspects. KEYWORDS: conditional, counterfactual, creativity, deduction, ‘if only’ thoughts, imagination, rationality, reasoning, simulation http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Byrne-04032007/Referees/ ================================================================== BBS MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW -- CALL RESPONSE INSTRUCTIONS ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the new Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Byrne-04032… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. * Please respond to this Call no later than May 14, 2007 NOTE: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ================================================================== ================================================================== Paul Bloom - Editor Barbara Finlay - Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------