One of the most exciting debates in philosophy of imagination in recent years has been over the epistemic use of imagination where imagination epistemically contributes to justifying beliefs and acquiring knowledge. This paper defends “generationism about imagination” according to which imagination is a generative source, rather than a preservative source, of justification. In other words, imagination generates new justification above and beyond prior justification provided by other sources. After clarifying the generation/preservation distinction (Section 2), we present an argument for generationism about imagination, which can be divided into two parts; the philosophical part and the empirical part. In the philosophical part of our argument (Section 3), we claim that generationism about imagination follows from what we call “INACCESSIBILITY”. According to INACCESSIBILITY, imagination is properly constrained by the imaginative constrainers (i.e., the prior representations that constrain the development of a scenario in imagination) to which non-imaginative belief-forming processes do not have access. In the empirical part of our argument (Section 4), we claim that INACCESSIBILITY is plausible in light of relevant studies and theories in the empirical literature, especially the literature on mental simulation (Section 4.1), core cognition (Section 4.2), and intuitive physics (Section 4.3).

中文翻译：

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想象力作为辩护的生成源泉

近年来，想象力哲学中最激动人心的辩论之一是关于想象力的认知使用，其中想象力在认知上有助于证明信念和获取知识。本文捍卫“关于想象力的世代论”，认为想象力是辩护的生成源，而不是保护源。换句话说，想象力产生了新的理由，超越了其他来源提供的先前理由。在阐明了生成/保存的区别（第 2 节）之后，我们提出了关于想象的生成论的论证，它可以分为两个部分；哲学部分和经验部分。在我们论证的哲学部分（第 3 节），我们声称关于想象力的世代论源于我们所谓的“不可接近性”。根据 INACCESIBILITY，想象力受到想象约束（即限制想象场景发展的先验表征）的适当约束，非想象的信念形成过程无法访问这些约束。在我们论证的实证部分（第 4 节），我们声称根据实证文献中的相关研究和理论，特别是关于心理模拟（第 4.1 节）、核心认知（第 4.2 节）和直觉的文献，不可接近性是合理的物理学（第 4.3 节）。