Philosophy Now Forum

Einstein once said "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. " Hmmm... its easy to accept such a claim in the area of natural sciences. How about in the area of history?

It fills the gaps. Ancient history and archaeology is, I dare say, largely based on imagination colouring evidence. All history contains evidence and accounts, and imagination and its derivatives is the ultimate factors to put x and y together and get a more exciting and useful "z". Evidence and accounts are usually very limited, but using them to narrow things down increases the chances for things to "have taken place" in "that sort-of way" by "those kind-of people".

You can ask a historian and they could say that "oh, we are !very! certain that's how it happened!", but at the bottom, their certainty is clouded in huge amounts of assumptions and abstract thinking.

Hmm agreed but can historical accounts and evidence be considered knowledge in the fear place? Any takers haha

Yes, it is knowledge. But I go with Einstein, because knowing from some scripture that "10 000 men rode westwards this morning on the third day after the death of x-pharao" is just pointless knowledge if you don't add imagination. That statement changes nothing, because basically it could be any army/pack of people who went anywhere. You need more imagination to couple a little knowledge than you need knowledge to couple imagination. That is, you can make a lot of "produced knowledge" from a little "raw knowledge" with large quanta of imagination. Whereas large quanta of knowledge with little imagination leaves us tons of useless facts. You have to assume, you have to put yourself in the imaginative person's shoes to understand just how things correlate between historical accounts and material evidence.

In history people rarely want "data", they want a "story", and they want it to be real, but it can't be real, you can just make it presumably *real*, give it as much life as you can. Finding an ancient Viking sword in America does not tell anything else than that for some reason there had arrived an ancient Viking sword to America. *How* it happened is the job of imagination, the evidence does not give any special reason to believe that Vikings once settled America besides guessing and illustrating possibilities for undertaking (in this example of course there are accounts of a Voyage by vikings that went westwards of Greenland, but you got my point I hope, and the accounts also needs imagination to put x and y together to get interesting z).

both are important

imagination leads to the quest for knowledge, therefor it is essential.