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One of the first tasks in investigating imagination is to determine what kind of phenomenon it is and to work out appropriate conceptual and descriptive vocabulary for its basic features. Traditionally it has been understood as dependent on sense perception and related to memory. The skeptical empiricist David Hume (1711–1776) laid down the rule that it is impossible for us to imagine what we have not already experienced through sense. But a thought experiment he devised—showing that if we use arrays to organize phenomena we have already experienced, we can fill gaps by imagination—can generate a limitless number of exceptions to his rule. This suggests a non-Humean possibility: image-appearances are not isolated data but take place in structured fields of interconnected experience. Sensation, imagination, and memory all produce or require such fields as the experiential place necessary for the emergence of appearances. Fields can be conceptually marked and articulated, which yields a matrix or topography. It is this conceptual marking of a field—conceptual topology—that makes images describable, knowable, and systematically variable. The structure of the articulated matrix in a field can often itself be experienced as a more abstract field, so that we come to grasp phenomena in a biplanar way: one field in terms of another. This phenomenon of projective biplanar field experience is cognitively productive and also yields insight into "fields" as diverse as game playing and artistic production.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6507-8_3

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