§ 21 Imaginative testing
It is possible to go a step further. One can even bypass rational testing and test just for possibility.1
Without empirical and rational testing, our conceptual framework may yield inferential outcomes that are neither empirically nor rationally justified, but at least imaginable and imaginably possible.
And they do so based on presumed or imagined properties of things. In that sense, a rational basis does remain recognisable in all forms of creative exploration.
In this way, we produce fantasies and imaginings, daydreams, exploring the remotely possible.
Free association and even random moves in the game of giving and asking for reasons produce statements that we might sensibly dismiss as madness.
And yet even these mad utterances can give us something useful, even though their worth is often the result of contingency and accident.
Whatever the discovery, before they are put to use, it is our responsibility to have them critically appraised, as we would not want things to come to harm through intellectual negligence.
We may now have covered the full range of possible thought bearing on intentional action, allowing for the empirically rigorous, the rationally systematic, the freely explorative, and the mad.
All of them have their uses.
© Jacob Voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
- A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, TU/e (2024) ↩︎