Pragmatic Imagination Principles 1-6:

1

The imagination serves diverse cognitive processes as an entire spectrum of activity.

2

The imagination both resolves and widens the gap between what is unfamiliar - new/novel/strange - and what is known. This gap increases along the spectrum from left to right. Within the range of abductive reasoning, there is a shift from using the imagination for sense-making to sense-breaking, where one first widens the gap and then resolves it with the imagination.

3

The Pragmatic Imagination pro-actively imagines the actual in light of meaningful purposeful possibilities. It sees opportunity in everything.

4

The Pragmatic Imagination sees thought and action as indivisible and reciprocal. Therefore it is part of all cognitive activity that serves thought and action for anticipating, and thought and action for follow-through.

5

The imagination must be instrumentalized to turn ideas into action - the entire spectrum of the imagination. And the generative/poïetic/sometimes-disruptive side of the spectrum is especially critical in a world that requires radically new visions and actions.

6
Because the imagination is not under conscious control, we need to understand, find, and design ways to set it in motion and scaffold it for play and purpose.