About this topic
Summary Historically, philosophers tended to view imagination as tightly bound up with the notion of mental imagery.  Although this tradition came under attack amidst the verificationism and behaviorism of the early to mid 20th century, most philosophers today continue to see an important connection between imagery and imagination.  Exactly what that connection is, however, has been much disputed.  Important questions include the following:  Must imagination involve imagery, or can there be non-imagistic imagining?  How can we account for the difference between imagination and other mental activities (such as memory) that involve imagery?  What is the role of imagery in imagination?
Key works Ryle 1960 famously argues against the existence of mental imagery and, relatedly, that there is no such thing as a faculty of imagination.  Kind 2001 and Casey 1971 explicitly take up the connection between mental imagery and imagination.  Byrne 2010 and Noordhof 2002 each take up the connection between imagining and related activities like perceiving.  Block 1981 is a useful collection of articles about mental imagery; Tye 1991 discusses the nature of imagistic representation.  
Introductions Kind 2005
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143 found
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  1. Attitude and image, or, what will simulation theory let us eliminate?Nigel J. T. Thomas - manuscript
    Stich & Ravenscroft (1994) have argued that (contrary to most people's initial assumptions) a simulation account of folk psychology may be consistent with eliminative materialism, but they fail to bring out the full complexity or the potential significance of the relationship. Contemporary eliminativism (particularly in the Churchland version) makes two major claims: the first is a rejection of the orthodox assumption that realistically construed propositional attitudes are fundamental to human cognition; the second is the suggestion that with the advancement of (...)
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  2. Perception, force, and content.Dominic Gregory - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.
    [Open Access.] Perceptual experiences have presentational phenomenology: we seem to encounter real situations in the course of visual experiences, for instance. The current paper articulates and defends the claim that the contents of at least some perceptual experiences are inherently presentational. On this view, perceptual contents are not always forceless in the way that, say, the propositional content that 2 + 2 = 4 is generally taken to be, as a content that may be asserted or denied or merely supposed; (...)
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  3. Imagining What You Intend.Peter Langland-Hassan - forthcoming - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences.
    If we are free to imagine what we choose, this is likely because our intentions determine what we are imagining. However, in a recent article, Munro and Strohminger (2021) argue that, in some cases of imagistic imagining, our intentions do not determine what we are imagining. They offer examples where, intuitively, a person intends to imagine one thing but, due to the causal source of the image used, imagine another. This paper acknowledges the challenge posed by these cases while arguing (...)
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  4. Aphantasia and Conscious Thought.Preston Lennon - forthcoming - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind, volume 3.
    The sensory constraint on conscious thought says that if a thought is phenomenally conscious, its phenomenal properties must be reducible to some sensory phenomenal character. I argue that the burgeoning psychological literature on aphantasia, an impoverishment in the ability to generate mental imagery, provides a counterexample to the sensory constraint. The best explanation of aphantasics’ introspective reports, neuroimaging, and task performance is that some aphantasics have conscious thoughts without sensory mental imagery. This argument against the sensory constraint supports the existence (...)
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  5. Aphantasia, dysikonesia, anauralia: call for a single term for the lack of mental imagery – Commentary on Dance et al. (2021) and Hinwar and Lambert (2021).Merlin Monzel, David Mitchell, Fiona Macpherson, Joel Pearson & Adam Zeman - forthcoming - Cortex.
    Recently, the term ‘aphantasia’ has become current in scientific and public discourse to denote the absence of mental imagery. However, new terms for aphantasia or its subgroups have recently been proposed, e.g. ‘dysikonesia’ or ‘anauralia’, which complicates the literature, research communication and understanding for the general public. Before further terms emerge, we advocate the consistent use of the term ‘aphantasia’ as it can be used flexibly and precisely, and is already widely known in the scientific community and among the general (...)
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  6. The Epistemic Role of Vividness.Joshua Myers - forthcoming - Analysis.
    The vividness of mental imagery is epistemically relevant. Intuitively, vivid and intense memories are epistemically better than weak and hazy memories, and using a clear and precise mental image in the service of spatial reasoning is epistemically better than using a blurry and imprecise mental image. But how is vividness epistemically relevant? I argue that vividness is higher-order evidence about one’s epistemic state, rather than first-order evidence about the world. More specifically, the vividness of a mental image is higher-order evidence (...)
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  7. How Imagination Informs.Joshua Myers - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    An influential objection to the epistemic power of the imagination holds that it is uninformative. You cannot get more out of the imagination than you put into it, and therefore learning from the imagination is impossible. This paper argues, against this view, that the imagination is robustly informative. Moreover, it defends a novel account of how the imagination informs, according to which the imagination is informative in virtue of its analog representational format. The core idea is that analog representations represent (...)
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  8. Imagination as a Source of Empirical Justification.Joshua Myers - forthcoming - Philosophy Compass.
    Traditionally, philosophers have been skeptical that the imagination can justify beliefs about the actual world. After all, how could merely imagining something give you any reason to believe that it is true? However, within the past decade or so, a lively debate has emerged over whether the imagination can justify empirical belief and, if so, how. This paper provides a critical overview of the recent literature on the epistemology of imagination and points to avenues for future research.
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  9. Imaginative Beliefs.Joshua Myers - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue for the existence of imaginative beliefs: mental states that are imaginative in format and doxastic in attitude. I advance two arguments for this thesis. First, there are imaginings that play the functional roles of belief. Second, there are imaginings that play the epistemic roles of belief. These arguments supply both descriptive and normative grounds for positing imaginative beliefs. I also argue that this view fares better than alternatives that posit distinct imaginative and doxastic states to account for the (...)
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  10. Against imagination.Bence Nanay - forthcoming - In Jonathan Cohen & Brian McLaughlin (eds.), Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Mind (2nd Edition). Oxford: Blackwell.
    The term ‘imagination’ may seem harmless. We talk about imagination all the time. Nonetheless, I will argue that we should treat it with suspicion. More precisely, I will argue that the explanatory power of the concept of imagination can be fully captured by a scientifically more respectable and more powerful concept, namely, the concept of mental imagery.
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  11. The Prima Facie View of Perceptual Imagination.Andrea Rivadulla-Duró - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    Perception is said to have assertoric force: It inclines the perceiver to believe its content. In contrast, perceptual imagination is commonly taken to be non-assertoric: Imagining winning a piano contest does not incline the imaginer to believe they actually won. However, abundant evidence from clinical and experimental psychology shows that imagination influences attitudes and behavior in ways similar to perceptual experiences. To account for these phenomena, I propose that perceptual imaginings have implicit assertoric force and put forth a theory—the Prima (...)
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  12. The Epistemic Role of the Imagination.Margot Strohminger - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Jonathan Dancy, Matthias Steup & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
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  13. Empathic Imaginings and Knowledge of What It Is Like in Aesthetic Cognitivism.Íngrid Vendrell Ferran - forthcoming - In Empathy and the Aesthetic Mind. Bloomsbury.
  14. Imagining the Past of the Present.Mark Windsor - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Some objects we value because they afford a felt connection with people, events, or places connected with their past. Visiting Canterbury cathedral, you encounter the place where, in 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered by four knights of Henry II. Knowing that you are standing in the very place where Becket’s blood was spilled gives the past event a sense of tangible reality. One feels ‘in touch with’ the past; history seems to ‘come alive’. In this paper, I propose an (...)
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  15. Imagination constrained, imagination constructed.Christopher Gauker - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (1):485-512.
    A number of authors have asked what it takes for a course of mental imagery to be epistemically or practically useful. This paper addresses a prior question, namely, the difference between courses of imagination that are realistic and those that are fantastic. One approach, suggested by recent literature concerning the utility of imagery, holds that a course of imagination represents realistically if and only if the course of events represented conforms to certain accepted constraints. Against this it will be argued (...)
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  16. Aus Text wird Bild.Alisa Geiß - 2024 - In Gerhard Schreiber & Lukas Ohly (eds.), KI:Text: Diskurse über KI-Textgeneratoren. De Gruyter. pp. 115-132.
    Over the last two years, the third wave of artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged powerful tools for both artistic expression and scientific research. In design, image generators display an equivalent disruption to text generators, while the medium of text creates the new scope of writing prompts. This contribution discusses the ambivalences between text and image generators via two main theses: first about the potential of prompting and generated images as a medium of discourse; second, it examines the reasoning behind their (...)
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  17. Die blinden Schatten von Narcissus.Roberto Arruda (ed.) - 2023 - Sao Paulo: Terra à Vista.
    Diese Arbeit wird wesentliche Fragen über das kollektive Imaginär und seine Beziehungen zur Realität und Wahrheit ansprechen. Zunächst sollten wir dieses Thema in einem konzeptionellen Rahmen ansprechen, gefolgt von der entsprechenden Tatsachenanalyse demonstrierbarer Verhaltensrealitäten. Wir werden nicht nur die Methodik, sondern vor allem die Prinzipien und Sätze der analytischen Philosophie annehmen. Die vorliegende Arbeit beruht analytischer Reflexion. Wir werden so umfassend und tief wie möglich spekulieren und die Ergebnisse unserer Gedanken ausdrücken. Trotz des multidisziplinären Charakters des Themas und der methodischen (...)
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  18. Mental Imagery: Greasing the Mind's Gears.Dan Cavedon-Taylor - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23.
    This paper introduces a novel conceptualisation of mental imagery; namely, that is grease for the mind’s gears (MGT). MGT is not just a metaphor. Rather, it describes an important and overlooked higher-order function of mental imagery: that it aids various mental faculties discharge their characteristic functional roles. MGT is motivated by reflection on converging evidence from clinical, experimental and social psychology and solves at least two neglected conceptual puzzles about mental imagery. The first puzzle concerns imagery’s architectural promiscuity; that is, (...)
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  19. On the Ambiguity of Imagery and Particularity of Imaginings.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2023 - Topoi:1-9.
    It is often observed that images—including mental images—are in some sense representationally ambiguous. Some, including Jerry Fodor, have added that mental images only come to have determinate contents through the contribution of non-imagistic representations that accompany them. This paper agrees that a kind of ambiguity holds with respect to mental imagery, while arguing (pace Fodor) that this does not prevent imagery from having determinate contents in the absence of other, non-imagistic representations. Specifically, I argue that mental images can represent determinate (...)
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  20. Desire, imagination, and the perceptual analogy.Kael McCormack - 2023 - Philosophical Explorations 26 (2):234-253.
    According to the guise of the good, a desire for P represents P as good in some respect. ‘Perceptualism’ further claims that desires involve an awareness of value analogous to perception. Perceptualism explains why desires justify actions and how desires can end the regress of practical justification. However, perception paradigmatically represents the actual environment, while desires paradigmatically represent prospective states. An experience E is an awareness of O when the nature of E depends on the nature of O. How could (...)
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  21. Form and Content: A Defence of Aesthetic Value in Science.Alice Murphy - 2023 - Philosophy of Science:1-26.
    Those who wish to defend the role of aesthetic values in science face a dilemma: Either aesthetic language is used metaphorically for what are ultimately epistemic features, or aesthetic language is used literally but it is difficult to see the importance of such values in science. I introduce a new account that gets around this problem by looking to an overlooked source of aesthetic value in science: the relation between form and content. I argue that a fit between the content (...)
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  22. The Epistemic Structure of the Imagination.Joshua Myers - 2023 - Dissertation, New York University
    The imagination is ubiquitous in our cognitive lives. You might imagine rotating a puzzle piece to determine whether it fits in an open space, or imagine what things are like from another person's perspective to figure out how they are feeling, or imagine a new rug in your living room to determine whether it matches the color of your sofa. These examples are mundane, but they point to a deep philosophical puzzle: how could merely imagining something give you any reason (...)
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  23. Perception needs modular stimulus-control.Anders Nes - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-30.
    Perceptual processes differ from cognitive, this paper argues, in functioning to be causally controlled by proximal stimuli, and being modular, at least in a modest sense that excludes their being isotropic in Jerry Fodor's sense. This claim agrees with such theorists as Jacob Beck and Ben Phillips that a function of stimulus-control is needed for perceptual status. In support of this necessity claim, I argue, inter alia, that E.J. Green's recent architectural account misclassifies processes deploying knowledge of grammar as perceptual. (...)
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  24. Imaginability as Representability: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Aphantasia.Christian Oliver Scholz - 2023 - Master of Logic Thesis (Mol) Series.
    Aphantasia, i.e., the inability to voluntarily form visual mental images, affects approximately 2 to 5 percent of the population and plays an important role in a more general debate revolving around the role of imagery for our cognition. This thesis investigates aphantasia by means of an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from contemporary neuroscientific research with historical philosophical arguments, with a specific focus on the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. A new theoretical concept, meta-imagination, is developed and it is argued that (...)
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  25. What Is a Photographic Register?Dawn M. Wilson - 2023 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81 (3):408-413.
    This Discussion Piece is a response to Mark Windsor's Discussion Piece (2023) 'Photographic Registers are Latent Images', which is a response to my article, (2021) 'Invisible Images and Indeterminacy: Why we need a Multi-stage Account of Photography' JAAC 79(2) 161-174.. -/- I argue that a photosensitive surface does not produce invisible pictorial features when it is exposed to light, and conclude, contra Windsor, that a photographic register is not a latent image. I argue that Windsor does not succeed in defending (...)
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  26. Imagining in Oppressive Contexts, or What’s Wrong with Blackface?Robin Zheng & Nils-Hennes Stear - 2023 - Ethics 133 (3):381-414.
    What is objectionable about “blacking up” or other comparable acts of imagining involving unethical attitudes? Can such imaginings be wrong, even if there are no harmful consequences and imaginers are not meant to apply these attitudes beyond the fiction? In this article, we argue that blackface—and imagining in general—can be ethically flawed in virtue of being oppressive, in virtue of either its content or what imaginers do with it, where both depend on how the imagined attitudes interact with the imagining’s (...)
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  27. Learning to Imagine.Amy Kind - 2022 - British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (1):33-48.
    Underlying much current work in philosophy of imagination is the assumption that imagination is a skill. This assumption seems to entail not only that facility with imagining will vary from one person to another, but also that people can improve their own imaginative capacities and learn to be better imaginers. This paper takes up this issue. After showing why this is properly understood as a philosophical question, I discuss what it means to say that one imagining is better than another (...)
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  28. A Lesser Being. From Louis Marin to Simondon and Back.Emmanuel Alloa - 2021 - Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 30 (61-62):8-13.
    Contribution for the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics' Special Issue no. 30 on "The Changing Ontology of the Image". The image’s power is a power of appearing without fully being what it allows to appear. In its strange relationship to what is lacking, the image also and simultaneously displays a remarkable excess—a phenomenal excess.
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  29. The possibility of imagining pain.Amy Kind - 2021 - Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 12 (2):183-189.
    : In Imagined and delusional pain Jennifer Radden aims to show that experiences of pain – and in particular, the pain associated with depression – cannot be merely delusional. Her reasoning relies crucially on the claim that the feeling of pain is imaginatively beyond our reach. Though she thinks that there are many ways that one can imagine scenarios involving oneself being in pain, she argues that one cannot imagine the feeling of pain itself. In this commentary, I target this (...)
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  30. Can imagination be unconscious?Amy Kind - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):13121-13141.
    Our ordinary conception of imagination takes it to be essentially a conscious phenomenon, and traditionally that’s how it had been treated in the philosophical literature. In fact, this claim had often been taken to be so obvious as not to need any argumentative support. But lately in the philosophical literature on imagination we see increasing support for the view that imagining need not occur consciously. In this paper, I examine the case for unconscious imagination. I’ll consider four different arguments that (...)
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  31. Bittersweet Food.Shen-yi Liao - 2021 - Critica 53 (157):71-93.
    Nostalgia and food are intertwined universals in human experience. All of us have experienced nostalgia centered on food, and all of us have experienced food infused with nostalgia. To explore the links between nostalgia and food, I start with a rough taxonomy of nostalgic foods, and illustrate it with examples. Despite their diversity, I argue that there is a psychological commonality to experiencing nostalgic foods of all kinds: imagination. On my account, imagination is the key to understanding the cognitive, conative, (...)
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  32. Two irreducible classes of emotional experiences: Affective imaginings and affective perceptions.Jonathan Mitchell - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (1):307-325.
  33. Are We Free to Imagine What We Choose?Daniel Munro & Margot Strohminger - 2021 - Synthese (5-6):1-18.
    It has long been recognized that we have a great deal of freedom to imagine what we choose. This paper explores a thesis—what we call “intentionalism (about the imagination)”—that provides a way of making this evident (if vague) truism precise. According to intentionalism, the contents of your imaginings are simply determined by whatever contents you intend to imagine. Thus, for example, when you visualize a building and intend it to be of King’s College rather than a replica of the college (...)
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  34. The Epistemic Status of the Imagination.Joshua Myers - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (10):3251-3270.
    Imagination plays a rich epistemic role in our cognitive lives. For example, if I want to learn whether my luggage will fit into the overhead compartment on a plane, I might imagine trying to fit it into the overhead compartment and form a justified belief on the basis of this imagining. But what explains the fact that imagination has the power to justify beliefs, and what is the structure of imaginative justification? In this paper, I answer these questions by arguing (...)
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  35. Reasoning with Imagination.Joshua Myers - 2021 - In Amy Kind & Christopher Badura (eds.), Epistemic Uses of Imagination. Routledge.
    This chapter argues that epistemic uses of the imagination are a sui generis form of reasoning. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, there are imaginings which instantiate the epistemic structure of reasoning. Second, reasoning with imagination is not reducible to reasoning with doxastic states. Thus, the epistemic role of the imagination is that it is a distinctive way of reasoning out what follows from our prior evidence. This view has a number of important implications for the epistemology of the (...)
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  36. Two Ways of Imagining Galileo's Experiment.Margot Strohminger - 2021 - In Christopher Badura & Amy Kind (eds.), Epistemic Uses of Imagination. Routledge. pp. 202-217.
    Thought experiments provide a conspicuous case study for epistemologists of the imagination. Galileo’s famous thought experiment about falling stones is a central example in the debate about how thought experiments in science work. According to a standard interpretation, the thought experiment poses a challenge to an Aristotelian principle about falling bodies that conceives of bodies in an extremely liberal way. This chapter argues that this interpretation is implausible and then shows how the thought experiment might present a challenge to a (...)
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  37. Cognitive Penetration: Inference or Fabrication?Lu Teng - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (3):547-563.
    ABSTRACT Cognitive penetrability refers to the possibility that perceptual experiences are influenced by our beliefs, expectations, emotions, or other personal-level mental states. In this paper, I focus on the epistemological implication of cognitive penetration, and examine how, exactly, aetiologies matter to the justificatory power of perceptual experiences. I examine a prominent theory, according to which some cognitively penetrated perceptual experiences are like conclusions of bad inferences. Whereas one version of this theory is psychologically implausible, the other version has sceptical consequences. (...)
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  38. Imagining stories: attitudes and operators.Neil Van Leeuwen - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (2):639-664.
    This essay argues that there are theoretical benefits to keeping distinct—more pervasively than the literature has done so far—the psychological states of imagining that p versus believing that in-the-story p, when it comes to cognition of fiction and other forms of narrative. Positing both in the minds of a story’s audience helps explain the full range of reactions characteristic of story consumption. This distinction also has interesting conceptual and explanatory dimensions that haven’t been carefully observed, and the two mental state (...)
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  39. Why Images Cannot be Arguments, But Moving Ones Might.Marc Champagne & Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen - 2020 - Argumentation 34 (2):207-236.
    Some have suggested that images can be arguments. Images can certainly bolster the acceptability of individual premises. We worry, though, that the static nature of images prevents them from ever playing a genuinely argumentative role. To show this, we call attention to a dilemma. The conclusion of a visual argument will either be explicit or implicit. If a visual argument includes its conclusion, then that conclusion must be demarcated from the premise or otherwise the argument will beg the question. If (...)
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  40. The dimensions of episodic simulation.B. Mahr Johannes - 2020 - Cognition 196 (1):104085.
    Human adults possess the extraordinary ability to produce mental imagery about a wide variety of non-occurrent events. We can, for example, simulate the perception of different places, different times, different possibilities, or others’ perspectives. Findings from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience suggest that all of these capacities rely on the same neuro-cognitive mechanism: episodic simulation. This ability produces mental imagery by constructively recombining elements of past experiences to simulate event representations. However, if episodic simulation indeed produces mental imagery, it (...)
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  41. Toward a Pluralist Account of the Imagination in Science.Alice Murphy - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):957-967.
    Typically, the imagination in thought experiments has been taken to consist in mental images; we visualize the state of affairs described. A recent alternative from Fiora Salis and Roman Frigg main...
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  42. The Two Faces of Mental Imagery.Margherita Arcangeli - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (2):304-322.
    Mental imagery has often been taken to be equivalent to “sensory imagination”, the perception‐like type of imagination at play when, for example, one visually imagines a flower when none is there, or auditorily imagines a music passage while wearing earplugs. I contend that the equation of mental imagery with sensory imagination stems from a confusion between two senses of mental imagery. In the first sense, mental imagery is used to refer to a psychological attitude, which is perception‐like in nature. In (...)
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  43. Imagery and Possibility.Dominic Gregory - 2019 - Noûs 54 (4):755-773.
    We often ascribe possibility to the scenes that are displayed by mental or nonmental sensory images. The paper presents a novel argument for thinking that we are prima facie justified in ascribing metaphysical possibility to what is displayed by suitable visual images, and it argues that many of our imagery‐based ascriptions of metaphysical possibility are therefore prima facie justified. Some potential objections to the arguments are discussed, and some potential extensions of them, to cover nonvisual forms of imagery and nonmetaphysical (...)
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  44. Aphantasia and the Decay of Mental Images.Steve Humbert-Droz - 2019 - In Florian Cova & Sébastien Réhault (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics. Londres, Royaume-Uni: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 167-174.
    Testimonies about aphantasia are still surprisingly rare, more than a century after Galton. It is therefore difficult to understand how a person devoid of (a kind of) imagination actually thinks. In order to outline "what it is like" to be aphantasic, I will start by compiling two qualitative interviews with aphantasics that I will then compare with other testimonies collected in literature and online. The fact that aphantasia is poorly documented may also explain why few philosophers (with the notable exception (...)
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  45. Why Successful Performance in Imagery Tasks Does not Require the Manipulation of Mental Imagery.Thomas Park - 2019 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 2 (X):1-11.
    Nanay (2017) argues for unconscious mental imagery, inter alia based on the assumption that successful performance in imagery tasks requires the manipulation of mental imagery. I challenge this assumption with the help of results presented in Shepard and Metzler (1971), Zeman et al. (2010), and Keogh and Pearson (2018). The studies suggest that imagery tasks can be successfully performed by means of cognitive/propositional strategies which do not rely on imagery.
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  46. Memory, Imagery, and Self-Knowledge.Dustin Stokes - 2019 - Avant: Special Issue-Thinking with Images 10 (2).
    One distinct interest in self-knowledge concerns whether one can know about one’s own mental states and processes, how much, and by what methods. One broad distinction is between accounts that centrally claim that we look inward for self-knowledge (introspective methods) and those that claim that we look outward for self-knowledge (transparency methods). It is here argued that neither method is sufficient, and that we see this as soon as we move beyond questions about knowledge of one’s beliefs, focusing instead on (...)
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  47. Mental imagery and fiction.Dustin Stokes - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (6):731-754.
    Fictions evoke imagery, and their value consists partly in that achievement. This paper offers analysis of this neglected topic. Section 2 identifies relevant philosophical background. Section 3 offers a working definition of imagery. Section 4 identifies empirical work on visual imagery. Sections 5 and 6 criticize imagery essentialism, through the lens of genuine fictional narratives. This outcome, though, is not wholly critical. The expressed spirit of imagery essentialism is to encourage philosophers to ‘put the image back into the imagination’. The (...)
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  48. Characterizing the Imaginative Attitude.Nicholas Wiltsher - 2019 - Philosophical Papers 48 (3):437-469.
    Three thoughts strongly influence recent work on sensory imagination, often without explicit articulation. The image thought says that all mental states involving a mental image are imaginative. The attitude thought says that, if there is a distinctive imaginative attitude, it is a single, monolithic attitude. The function thought says that the functions of sensory imagination are identical or akin to functions of other mental states such as judgment or belief. Taken together, these thoughts create a theoretical context within which eliminativism (...)
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  49. Imagination: A Lens, Not a Mirror.Nick Wiltsher - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    The terms "imagination'' and "imaginative'' can be readily applied to a profusion of attitudes, experiences, activities, and further phenomena. The heterogeneity of the things to which they're applied prompts the thoughts that the terms are polysemous, and that there is no single, coherent, fruitful conception of imagination to be had. Nonetheless, much recent work on imagination ascribes implicitly to a univocal way of thinking about imaginative phenomena: the imitation theory, according to which imaginative experiences imitate other experiences. This approach is (...)
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  50. Marking the Perception–Cognition Boundary: The Criterion of Stimulus-Dependence.Jacob Beck - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2):319-334.
    Philosophy, scientific psychology, and common sense all distinguish perception from cognition. While there is little agreement about how the perception–cognition boundary ought to be drawn, one prominent idea is that perceptual states are dependent on a stimulus, or stimulus-dependent, in a way that cognitive states are not. This paper seeks to develop this idea in a way that can accommodate two apparent counterexamples: hallucinations, which are prima facie perceptual yet stimulus-independent; and demonstrative thoughts, which are prima facie cognitive yet stimulus-dependent. (...)
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