The conceptual nature of imaginative content
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The conceptual nature of imaginative content Margherita Arcangeli1 Received: 14 July 2020 / Accepted: 20 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
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 (perception and belief, respectively) along the conceptuality dimension: while the content of belief-like imagination is fully conceptual, the content of perception-like imagination is fully (or at least partially) 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 (independently of whether either perception or belief has non-conceptual content). 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. Keywords Perception-like/sensory imagination · Belief-like/cognitive imagination · Conceptual content · Non-conceptual content · Observational concepts
1 Introduction Imagination is widely thought to come in (at least) two varieties: a sensory variety and a non-sensory or cognitive one. Different labels have been used to capture such a distinction, or something like it: “objectual” vs. “propositional” imagination (Yablo 1993), “perceptual” or “perception-like” vs. “belief-like” imagination (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002), “sensory” vs. “cognitive” imagination (e.g., McGinn 2004), “attitudinal” vs. “imagistic” imagining (see Kind 2016).
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Margherita Arcangeli [email protected] Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS-EHESS-ENS), PSL University, École Normale Supérieure, Pavillon Jardin, 29, rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
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Synthese
Despite some divergences among taxonomies,1 a common thought is that while the sensory variety (hereafter S-Imagination) is in a relevant sense similar to perception, the cognitive variety (hereafter C-Imagination) is akin to belief. However, it is far from clear what exactly sets these two varieties of imagination apart. Saying that S-imagination and C-imagination mimic perception and belief, respectively, is not very informative as such. More should be said about what features make the former perception-like and the latter belief-like. Moreover, we might wonder why we should consider S-imagination and C-imagination as species of the same genus (viz. imagination), rather than two different kinds of mental state, as it is typically granted for their counterparts – to borrow Currie and Ravenscroft’s (2002) term—namely perception and belief. It is crucial to investigate further what S-Imagination and C-Imagination are and how they are related, in o
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