Against Imagination

Abstract

This chapter argues 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. The mind is routinely described in terms of concepts from ordinary language without much examination of how accurately these concepts pick out actual mental processes or phenomena. Probably the most commonly drawn distinction between different imaginative episodes is between sensory and propositional imagination. Mental imagery, like perception, can happen in all sense modalities. Mental imagery may be voluntary or involuntary and it may be conscious or unconscious. The chapter introduces another category in the discussion of sensory and propositional imagination, namely, supposition. The crucial piece of evidence for the importance of mental imagery in propositional imagination comes from recent findings about the importance of mental imagery in language processing.

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