The Imaginative Potential Field: A Theory of Social Perception, Counterfactual Personhood, and the Ethics of Certainty

This manuscript presents an original theoretical framework in philosophy of mind and social epistemology—the Imaginative Potential Field (IPF)—for understanding how persons are constituted in social perception under conditions of uncertainty. It argues that individuals are not encountered as fixed essences but as counterfactual distributions of imagined trajectories, generated through scenario-branching, affective valence, and iterative consolidation. The framework explains how imagination exerts causal influence on present perception and moral judgment through what is termed a near-time-travel effect, whereby simulated futures alter the observer’s current evaluative posture. The manuscript formalizes this process, identifies systematic failure modes (including projection, valence-lock, and collapse), and advances porosity to reality as an ethical discipline governing responsible social imagination. This document is an unpublished philosophical manuscript / preprint and has not undergone peer review.