Abstracts

Lecture 1, Tuesday, March 28

What Is Sensory Imagining?

What is it to visualize a castle or the Big Bang, to imagine the smell of chocolate, or to compose a tune in one's head? The answer I offer has three parts. First, sensory imagining exhibits various surface phenomena that distinguish it from sensing. Second, the states that exhibit those features are both manifestly representational and expressions of our agency. But third, the representing in question has a particular structure; a structure analogous to that found in perception, but filled out here in very different ways. The structure as found in perception has been described by various philosophers, from Husserl to Alva Nöe. Its application to imagining is new.

Lecture 2, Wednesday, March 29

Sensory Imagining and Knowing

What form of access do we have to the contents of sensory imagining? I hold that every aspect of what we imagine we are aware of. (This is not to say we have the corresponding belief, or that we are necessarily aware of it as imagined.) Relatedly, I deny that it is possible to observe what we imagine. Both claims face serious challenges from a series of examples. I show how the cases and the claims can be reconciled, by drawing on the account of imagining's structure given in the first lecture. That account enables us to cede some ground to the cases: there can be aspects of the world as we've imagined it of which we are not aware. However, these are not part of the contents of imagining proper; and the process by which we become aware of them is more like inference than observation. The upshot is that our access to sensory imagining closely parallels that we have to the contents of our thoughts. What we think and what we imagine is open to us, as what we perceive is not.

Lecture 3, Friday, March 31

Sensory Imagining and Feeling

Does imagining furnish objects for emotion and other feelings? Although a positive answer can seem little more than common sense, I am sceptical. Many affective states are such that what rationalizes them and what they motivate integrate, in such a way as to require that their objects be given as their causes. Since imagined objects are never given as causes of how we really feel, in these cases real feelings cannot be directed at imagined things. Instead, I propose, what we take to be real feelings are themselves often merely imagined. I say what it is to imagine a feeling, identifying here too structures analogous to those described in lecture 1. I use that account to explain why, if feeling is only imagined, we undergo certain bodily and other changes that are only too real. Finally, I consider how far the resulting view can accommodate the distinctive motivational profile of feeling that is merely imagined, as opposed to really felt.