As A historian of ideas, you would expect me to be concerned with the rise and fall of concepts throughout recorded history. What fascinates me the most, however, is the way ideas evolve. The philosopher Daniel Dennett from Tufts University in Boston described evolution as the most important idea ever, and the process certainly applies to ideas themselves and to language, in which most ideas are expressed. I think that many psychological concepts, because they originate in language coined before the rise of science, are now outmoded: in particular, "imagination" and "introspection". For some people, ideas are ten a penny: what counts is ideas that work. For them, imagination isn't some free-floating mental activity, some open-ended production of concepts or hypotheses, but thoughts that can be used to produce tangible, practical products. They prefer , something captured by that very useful French verb, realiser, to "make real". This implies that in any imaginative enterprise there is a process between the original thought and its final form, and that this activity -realisation - is as crucial as the original idea.
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