Imagination [addendum]
Late-twentieth-century discussions of imagination have tended to focus on three sorts of issues. Discussions in the philosophy of mind have focused on the cognitive architecture underlying imagination, and on the ways that imagination differs from and resembles belief, perception, and supposition. Discussions in modal epistemology have focused on the extent to which imaginability—and its cousin conceivability—can serve as guides to possibility. And discussions in aesthetics have focused on a cluster of issues concerning our imaginative engagement with fictional characters and events.
Philosophy of Mind
Within the philosophy of mind, three distinct notions of imagination have been discussed: sensory imagination (quasi-perceptual experience in the absence of appropriate stimuli); recreative imagination (mental simulation); and creative imagination (combining ideas in unexpected and unconventional ways), with the great bulk of discussion devoted to the former two.
Sensory Imagination
Drawing on work by cognitive psychologists (e.g., Shepard 1982, Farah 1999), philosophers have explored the extent to which sensory imagination in general, and visual mental imagery in particular, employs the same systems as those involved in corresponding perceptual experience, and the related question of whether mental images are encoded in analogue form (as mental pictures) or propositionally (as descriptions). While the mainstream view holds that entertaining a visual mental image involves inspecting some sort of picture-like object (Kosslyn 1994), critics—most notably Zenon Pylyshyn (2003)—maintain that reasoning with mental images need not involve any sort of quasi-sensory representation.
