Abstract

Not all imaginings are successful; sometimes when an imaginer sets out to imagine some target, her imagining involves some kind of mistake. The error can be diagnosed in two ways: the imaginer imagines her target in a way that mischaracterizes it, or the imaginer fails to imagine her target at all and rather imagines something else that is similar in some ways to that target. In ordinary day-to-day imaginings, explanations of type seem most natural, but in discussions of philosophical imaginings, philosophers tend to adopt explanations of type. This paper argues against this tendency.