HPS student Char Brecevic will be presenting her paper titled "Erasing the Distinction between Scientific and Artistic Imagination" at the Bridging the Gap: Scientific Imagination Meets Aesthetic Imagination Conference at the London School of Economics. An abstract for her paper is provided below:
Imagination is implemented in both scientific and aesthetic contexts as a way in which scientists and artists can creatively engage with the world. As is common in philosophy of science, there may exist an intuition that scientific imagination must be distinct from artistic imagination in some respect. However, my central claim is that if one were to imagine a spectrum between artistic and scientific representation, this spectrum would be highly similar to, and more appositely understood as, one between least interpretatively constrained to most interpretatively constrained representations. I conclude that if imagination is understood to be the act of generating representations, whether they are wholly abstract or perceptible material entities, and the demarcation separating scientific from artistic representations is collapsed, the demarcation between scientific and artistic imagination is untenable.