Emilien Dereclenne

This dissertation focuses on the relation between imagination and technics. There is no actual research on the relationship between imagination, creativity and technics in contemporary cognitive science. Nowhere is the question of thetechnical constitutivity of imagination articulated. This question has only recently been sketched out as a theoretical project by enactive philosophers of cognitive science (Malafouris 2013; Hutto and Myin 2017; Gallagher 2017). In the wakeof it, proponents of 5E cognition approaches (i.e., enactive, embodied, embedded, extended and ecological cognition approach) have started takingthe role of socio-material and technical engagement in imagination more seriously (Poulsgaard 2019; Dereclenne 2020; Van Dijk and Rietveld 2020). This dissertation aims to pursue this reflection. Simply put, in light of a crossreading of pragmatism, French philosophy of technics, material anthropology and contemporary cognitive science, the stake is to show that technics shapes the imaginative and creative mind. Contemporary conceptions of imagination and creativity in the field ofcognitive science are mainly internalist and representationalist. Part one (chapters 1 and 2) argues that these views severely underestimate the role of technical and socio-material engagement in imaginative and creative processes. Guilty of a kind of dualism between mind and technics of which we should get rid of, internalist and representationalist conceptions of imagination and creativity understand technical development and engagement as means for the exteriorization of imaginative and creative achievements. These achievements remain internal to the representational brain only, prior to concrete embodied engagement with the technical environment. In this theoretical context, technics does not constitute, nor participate, in any way, into imaginative and creative processes. Chapter 2 presents epistemological (section one) and ontological (section two) principles that could help us to overcome the limitations of internalism and representationalism, and to think of the constitutive relationship between imagination and technics more efficiently. In light of John Dewey and Nelson’s Goodman’s pragmatist approaches, this chapter argues that the lack of consideration for technics is a result of a philosophical fallacy, the so-called “mereological fallacy”-- i.e. attributing to the mind-brain the only explanatory role while ignoring the essential and constitutive role of external factors and practical engagement. Chapter 2 explains how this fallacy works in the case of imagination and argues that there is another way to explain imaginative processes without postulating the existence of mental representations and reducing imaginative processes to purely internal and brain processes. This epistemological criticism leads to the promotion of an ontology of individual-world transactions, which is developed in the rest of the dissertation through Simondon’s ontology of relations, the enactive ontology of individual world couplings and the ecological ontology of affordances. Part 2 (chapter 3, 4 and 5) combines the analytic and the continental philosophical traditions, to offer an alternative theory of imagination and creativity as technically constituted. More specifically, chapter 3 presents the work of French philosopher of subjectivity and technics, Gilbert Simondon. It is shown how it is possible to combine Simondon’s conceptual framework and intuitions with 5E approaches. Like enactivists, Simondon thematizes the insertion of subjectivity in life. He also offers stimulating perspectives to help enactivists think about the articulation differently. That is, not only, as classical enaction does, between life, cognition and the lived body, but more extensively, between life, cognition and the sociocultural environment.