Chapter 1. Artistic Creativity in View of the Philosophy of Technology -- Chapter 2. Traditional and Cognitiviste Views of Conceivability -- Chapter 3. Traditional and Cognitiviste Views of Conceivability -- Chapter 4. The Phygital World: The Role of Imagination in the Development of Artificial Intelligence -- Chapter 5. Scientific and Literary Speech - How Fiction can Shape the Worldview of Scientists -- Chapter 6. Scientific Fictions and Historical Reality -- Chapter 7. Thought Experiments: The Subjunctive Mood in History -- Chapter 8. Constructive and Predictive Capabilities of the Alternative History Genre -- Chapter 9. Multiplayer Online Games Become Reality: A New Literary Genre -- Chapter 10. Artificial Intelligence as a Creator of Over-Normative Reality -- Chapter 11. Nomadism and Reality - Two scenarios for their interrelation and development -- Chapter 12. Emotive Lexis and a Scholar’s Hypothetical Portrait.

This book presents the proceedings of the 24th International Conference Professional Culture of the Specialist of the Future. Professionals and experts in all fields need to be prepared to handle unfamiliar situations. Some of these are unexpected events that may occur quite suddenly out of the blue, and others may emerge in the course of technological development or predicted trends. In order to successfully confront the future, professionals therefore need to engage in hypothetical thinking as they entertain concrete scenarios or fictitious possibilities. Scientists and engineers lead the way when they employ thought experiments and systematically consider alternative realities. Educators come up with creative approaches to foster the “art of the as-if.” This highly interdisciplinary collection of 50 papers discusses the theoretical challenge of hypothetical thinking and presents practical strategies for its promotion.