This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Jim Davies’ recent book: Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power (Pegasus Books 2019). Today we begin with an introduction from Jim. Commentaries and replies will appear on Wednesday and Thursday.

You Can Improve Your Imagination. But Probably Not Your Imagery.

It’s easy to think of visual imagination as being nothing more than mental imagery, but we have what we might call “conceptual imagination” as well, that doesn’t really have much to do with the senses. Imagine a triangle. Now add one side to make a square. Now add so many sides that there are 2001 of them. The picture of it in your mind’s eye would (or should) look just like a circle, because the details are too fine to make out with the resolution of your mental imagery (Dennett 2013, 290). So how is imagining a 2001-side polygon different from imagining a circle? Because you know that it’s a polygon, not a circle. Now change the polygon so that it has one fewer sides (2000 sides). It doesn’t look any different in the image! Both a 2000-sided polygon and a 2001-sided polygon will look just like circles in your mental imagery. The difference is only in your belief about the polygon. These beliefs are part of your imagination, too, even if they don’t particularly look like anything. This is one example of how you can have a non-sensory imagining.