Inference and Imagination
Ruth M. J. Byrne · 2026
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Description
Ruth M. J. Byrne argues in a 2026 essay that human reasoning runs on imagination: to draw a sound conclusion, we picture the possibilities a claim allows and check the conclusion against them. Her account draws on the mental models tradition, which holds that people reason by building small simulations of situations.
Evidence comes from cases where an added fact suppresses an inference people would otherwise draw, and from counterfactual thinking, where people mentally edit an event to undo it. Those edits, she notes, target the parts of a scene felt to be mutable, often the parts within someone's control. Inference and imagination, on this view, are two faces of one skill.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Ruth M. J. Byrne |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 50605 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |