Chess, Imagination and Perceptual Understanding

Abstract

This paper examines the role of the imagination in the way that human chess players (as contrasted with computers) exercise their understanding of both tactics and strategy. Phenomenological investigation of the way chess players think reveals important parallels between our grasp of the possibilities latent in a chess position, and our perceptual understanding of the essentially spatial nature of physical objects, a connection that has important implications for philosophical theories of perception.