Imagination in General Psychology: Thinking with Luca Tateo's "A Theory of Imagining, Knowing, and Understanding"

How should we understand imagination within the broader framework of general psychology? Turning to Luca Tateo's (2020) recent book, A theory of imagining, knowing, and understanding, I begin with asking what imagination is. The question leads to seeing the interplay between imagination, perception, and conceptual organization. Identifying the affective dimension of imagination and how imagination operates within a discursive reality, I explore the links between imagination and general psychology, with reference to Activity Theory, fundamental psychological categories, and normativity. Drawing on themes from general psychology can extend the study of imagination, while the study of imagination can in turn inform general psychology. Finally, I address some of the implications of this study for epistemology, education, and critical thinking.

“We Are Book Eight”: Dialoging the collective imagination through literary fan activism

This paper will explore how individuals employ imagination through collective action. First, I will outline a definition of imagination, focusing on how the dialogic nature of imagination provides an overarching framework for individuals focused on producing change. Next, I will discuss symbolic resources as a way to link one’s imagination with another’s. Qualitative interviews from The Harry Potter Alliance will be examined as a case where collective action is taken through shared resources. It will highlight how placing real-world issues in dialogue with imaginary constructs can assist in sharing imaginations toward worlds of what-if. Discussions around the relational aspect of collective imagination will end the paper.

Modal articulation: The psychological and semiotic functions of modalities in the sensemaking process

Within a semiotic and psychodynamic frame, we present and discuss the psychological construct of modal articulation. By modality, we mean the way a subject organizes the meaning of his/her own experience according to categories of necessity, possibility, opportunity, will, knowledge, permission, and duty. Modality is a relevant topic in some branches of philosophy, logics, linguistics, and semiotics, but there is no systematic discourse about it in psychology. The proposal of this work is to deal with some interesting and promising features of modal categories in the sensemaking process of subjective experience. Modalization is presented as a relevant semiotic organization in each contextual and dynamic sensemaking process in order to perform three functions: (a) connection between affective matrix and subjective experience, (b) mediation between subjective positioning in intersubjective context, and (c) vectorialization of action, namely orienting subjective agency in becoming temporal. Theoretical, methodological, and clinical implications are discussed.

Possible use in psychology of threshold concept in order to study sensemaking processes

Manifold forms of sensemaking processes and their simultaneity pose many questions about their integration and also on their development. Human beings mean their own experience and activity in the world by forms of symbolic meaning but also by several forms of embodied meaning, in an endo-semiotic and exo-semiotic key, such as the construction of artifacts, instruments, monuments, stories, myths. The culture in this perspective is not considered a repository of information and become an intersubjective process that develops over time and is rooted deeply in various embodied forms. Authors discuss the notion of threshold through two possible paths. The first one allows us to demarcate the boundaries of the domain of semiotic research and at the same time to reflect on the specificity of the different processes of sensemaking, from biological processes (vegetative and animal) to typically psychological processes, characteristic of human beings and of cultural dynamics. The second one deals with dynamics of transformation of the processes of sensemaking, claiming that the relationship between an organism and its environment has a gestaltic quality, whose form is constantly changing. The notion of threshold is developed in reference to the changes and transformations that mark discontinuous passages and developments within phases of stability.