A post by Alon Chasid

Imagining is a complicated mental activity. If we are asked to imagine, or find ourselves imagining, say, that the COVID-19 crisis is over, our imaginative episode will generally comprise more than just one single representational state with the content ‘the COVID-19 crisis is over.’ Rather, that representational state will likely be accompanied by sensory elements, additional imaginings, mental imagery, conative and emotional responses, and other mental states that are related, one way or another, to the fact that the crisis is over. Ordinarily, we seem to have access—perhaps even privileged access—to various elements of our imaginative activity. We have no trouble describing how our imaginings evolved, how we reacted emotionally or conatively to them, etc. There may be a problem with regard to tracking certain features of our stream of consciousness (Schwitzgebel 2011). But overall, tracking the main elements of our imaginative activity is quite straightforward.

A post by Alon Chasid.

Suppose you’re imagining a proposition, e.g., that Bernie Sanders is the current US President, that the price of coffee beans is falling, or that there are gold nuggets in a certain river. Ordinarily, you can correctly recount what you’ve imagined. But suppose you are asked whether the proposition you imagined was true in the relevant ‘imaginary world,’ the ‘world’ of your imaginative project. This question, without further qualification, may strike you as odd, probably because you take the answer to be trivial: it is obvious, you assume, that the proposition you imagined was true in the relevant imaginary world (henceforth: ‘i-world’). After all, you imagined it to be true. Imagining that p, you assume, renders p true in the imaginative project’s i-world.

This view is mistaken. Imagining a proposition doesn’t render that proposition true in the pertinent i-world. I don’t deny that to imagine a proposition is to imagine it to be true in the i-world. My claim is that it doesn’t follow from this that the imagined proposition is true in the i-world. Compare: to believe a proposition is to believe it to be true (i.e., true simpliciter, in the real world), but believing a proposition does not render the believed proposition true.