Relevant For:
- Philosophers refining models of mental representation and agency
- Cognitive scientists seeking conceptual clarity about simulation and control
- Artists and theorists interested in transferable heuristics for creative practice
- Graduate students mapping interdisciplinary research agendas
Remarkable Points:
- The volume privileges mechanistic and normative accounts that make imagination tractable as a cognitive capacity
- It assembles a taxonomy of creativity types that separates generation, evaluation, and transmission
- Several chapters operationalize imagination as a capacity for counterfactual structure-building rather than mere visualization
- The handbook consistently ties individual cognitive mechanisms to institutional and political consequences
- Editors enforce a cross-disciplinary vocabulary that supports comparative models
Most Liked (As-Is Statements):
"Imagination functions as a constrained form of hypothesis generation."
"Creativity requires a social scaffold as much as an internal engine."
"Evaluation and novelty are distinct processes with distinct failure modes."
Key Themes:
Theme 1: Mechanistic Clarity
The contributors move away from metaphors and toward manipulable mechanisms: mental simulation, recombinatory operators, and constraint-guided search. Each mechanism is pitched so it can be plugged into experimental or computational models.
Theme 2: Decomposing Creative Acts
The handbook separates generation, selection, and transmission as analytically independent steps. That decomposition reveals where failure points and interventions lie.
Theme 3: Normativity and Responsibility
Imagination is shown to be ethically loaded: what we can imagine shapes what we can justify and what we can demand politically. Responsibility attaches to imaginative practices, not just outcomes.
Theme 4: Domain Transfer and Expertise
Editors and authors map how domain-specific schemas enable cross-domain transfer and when they block it. The account reframes expertise as schema flexibility plus pruning heuristics.
Final Remark:
Read this handbook for the set of mental models it supplies. It converts vague intuitions into analytic levers: simulation as hypothesis, creativity as modular pipeline, normativity as process-sensitive. The payoff is practical: clearer experimental design, sharper ethical appraisal, and a usable vocabulary for interdisciplinary collaboration. The value is not completeness but instrumentality.
This is a toolbox that forces you to redesign how you think about imagination and creativity.
Similar Books:
- The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms by Margaret A. Boden
- The Literary Mind by Mark Turner
- The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics edited by Jerrold Levinson
- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind edited by Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann, and Sven Walter