The project "Counterfactual Knowledge from Imagination" investigated the epistemology of counterfactual thinking and its connections to the imagination. Thoughts about counterfactual situations are a central feature of human cognition, key to planning in any domain of activity: What would happen if I missed a mortgage payment? What would happen if May had called a second referendum on Brexit? It seems that knowledge about counterfactual situations is possible under some circumstances. The project aimed to improve our understanding of those circumstances and what role the imagination plays in specifying them. The guiding hypothesis of the project was that normal human cognition includes an imaginative capacity for evaluating conditionals; this same capacity can be used to evaluate a range of other claims too. How we can learn from the imagination is important for society because much of our decision-making, both individual and collective, relies on judgments reached using our imagination. The overall objectives were to get clearer on the nature of the imagination, its role in the evaluation of conditionals and related claims, and the relevance of the problem to the issue of how philosophers and scientists learn from what are sometimes called "thought experiments". The conclusions of the project provided support to its guiding hypothesis and helped to achieve these objectives. One project publication argued against a view of the imagination, "intentionalism", which has been thought to be incompatible, or at least in tension, with the thesis that the imagination can produce knowledge. Another project publication examined a prominent thought experiment from the history of physics due to Galileo. It argued that we are expected to use two different kinds of imagination in order to see how the counterfactual situation described by the thought experiment poses a challenge to a principle of motion.
