How does "what if" answer imagination?

By thinking outside the box.

“What if” is the spice of life or the bane of your existence depending on the questions and how you take the answers to them.

“what if” is what we presuppose reality to be if we are imagining something were different than what it actually is.

Or, it can mean, what potentially MIGHT be or what MIGHT potentially happen.

For instance, WHAT would you do IF there were a fire?
What IF there was a fire and a tornado at the same time?
What if it rains on the day of the event?

It takes imagination to imagine the outcome or possibilities.

It doesn’t. First of all, “imagination” is not a question, whereas “what if?” is. So if anything, “imagination” is the answer to “what if?” and not the other way around. But even that is misleading. It would be more accurate to say that we use our imagination to answer “what if?” questions. It’s not the only way to answer such questions, however, since experiments are also a way of answering “what if?” questions.

What if where imagination were reasons not answer?

Medicine.

Your original question was: If knowledge answers the question “what” and understanding answers the question “why” while wisdom answers the question “how” – what question does imagination answer?

Imagination was offered as the faculty that is used to answer what if questions. Now you are turning things around by making imagination the question and what if as the answer.

@LostInParadise Oh the question had a coherent grammatical first form?

That’s much more interesting, but still, I think my response would be something like:

* Knowledge does not (necessarily nor only) answer the question “what?”.

* Understanding does not (necessarily nor only) answer the question “why?”.

* Wisdom does not (necessarily nor only) answer the question “how”?

* Imagination, like the others, can answer (or not) many different questions, but mainly it is not a question-answerer. If I were forced to poetically generalize and say one thing that immagination does, I might (or might not) say that immagination poses “what if?”, or more like “what about this?”.

And now that I have a clue how to relate to the current question, I might (or might not) answer:

“How does what if answer imagination?”
– I don’t think it does. It seems to me that “what if?” is a question and is not an answer to anything, unless it’s a suggested answer to some problem, but it’s still a question not an answer per se.
– And “imagination” is also generally not a question, and doesn’t itself need or accept an answer.
– There might be some other questions that some imagination might inspire.

“Like reasons why what if is the answer to imagination”
– I don’t think that “what if?” could be “the answer” to the non-question “imagination”, except in a bizarre dialog such as:

George: “Imagination?”
Socrates: “what if?”

In which case, I think the reason why Socrates gave “what if?” as an answer to “imagination?” may have been because he was feeling snarky, but I may be projecting.

To me, “what if?” is a question, which I associate more with rationality, because that’s what I tend to do with “what if?” questions.

e.g. I tend to see the imagination of dumb Hollywood movies and think “what if?” about their stupid plots, and my rational mind answers the “what if?” with “certainly not what they just showed happen! That would never turn out that way! That’s dumb – what a waste of imagination and talent and energy.”