The conceptual nature of imaginative content

Synthese (1-2) (2020)
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Abstract

Imagination is widely thought to come in two varieties: perception-like and belief-like imagination. What precisely sets them apart, however, is not settled. More needs to be said about the features that make one variety perception-like and the other belief-like. One common, although typically implicit, view is that they mimic their counterparts along the conceptuality dimension: while the content of belief-like imagination is fully conceptual, the content of perception-like imagination is fully non-conceptual. Such a view, however, is not sufficiently motivated in the literature. I will show that there are good reasons to reject it and I will argue that both varieties of imagination involve fully conceptual contents. I will suggest an alternative way to draw the distinction between perception-like and belief-like imagination along the conceptuality dimension, according to which only perception-like imagination requires observational concepts.

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Margherita Arcangeli
École des hautes études en sciences sociale

Citations of this work

Imagination, Endogenous Attention, and Mental Agency.Tom Cochrane - 2023 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1:1-21.
Arnon Levy, Peter Godfrey-Smith (Eds.): The Scientific Imagination: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. [REVIEW]Michael T. Stuart - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (3):493-499.

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References found in this work

The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans - 1982 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by John Henry McDowell.
Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Reference and Consciousness.John Campbell - 2002 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
The origin of concepts.Susan Carey - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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