A post by Antonia Peacocke

In imagining something, you can bring to mind mental images all of whose imaged properties—including colors, shapes, smells, sights, sounds, and other perceptible and sensible qualities—underdetermine the content of what you imagine overall, or its total (imaginative) content. You can take a mental image of a horse that doesn’t itself ‘picture’ any motion whatsoever, and use it to imagine something that necessarily involves motion, like a horse galloping down a track. You can use a mental image of an apple to imagine a perfect hyperrealist sculpture of an apple. You can use an image of a man you can picture in order to imagine James K. Polk, whose precise features you just don’t know. Let’s call cases like these “underdetermination cases.” I’m going to set out a couple of views that aim to understand the content of imagination in these cases, and then raise an unsolved problem for such views.