The heterogeneity of experiential imagination

Abstract

Imagination is very often associated with the experienceable. Imagination is said to “re-create” conscious experiences. For instance, philosophers often talk of vision-like or audition-like imagination. How many varieties of experiential imagination are there, and how are they related? In this paper, we offer a detailed taxonomy of imaginative phenomena, based on both conceptual analysis and phenomenology, which contributes to answering these questions. First, we shall spell out the notion of experiential imagination as the imaginative capacity to re-create experiential perspectives. Second, we suggest that the domain of experiential imagination divides into objective and subjective imagination. In our interpretation, objective imagination comprises both sensory and cognitive imagination. In contrast, subjective imagination re-creates non-imaginative internal experiences of one’s own mind, including proprioception, agentive experience, feeling pain, and perhaps internal ways of gaining information about other types of mental states, such as sensory experience and belief. We show how our interpretation of the notion of subjective imagination differs from Zeno Vendler’s, who relies on an orthogonal distinction between two ways in which the self is involved in our imaginings. Finally, we show the relevance of our taxonomy for several important philosophical and scientific applications of the notion of imagination, including modal epistemology, cognitive resonance, mindreading and imaginative identification.