Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In the last years, philosophers have proposed diverse accounts of how our imaginative capacities affect our beliefs, desires, and emotions (Nichols 2004; Weinberg & Meskin 2006, Stock 2017). So far, imagination has been studied mainly in its propositional variant by focusing on engagement with fiction and active pretense (Schellenberg 2013; Gendler 2010, Langland-Hassan 2012). Less attention has been devoted to quasi-perceptual imaginings in which we imagine ourselves having a certain experience. Empirical findings in psychology demonstrate that imagining experiences often lead to similar psychological and behavioral consequences as actually having the analogous perceptual experience (Szpunar & Schacter 2013; Morewedge et al. 2010;  Shidlovski et al. 2014). This phenomenon has even been used in clinical settings with success, such as in imaginal exposure therapy (Hackmann, Bennett-Levy & Holmes, 2011). Together, this set of results suggest that the effects of experiential imaginings can sometimes be equivalent to the effects of perceptual experiences. Importantly, experiential imaginings have these effects even when people do not fail in recognizing the imaginative nature of the representation. Consequently, I postulate that in many subpersonal operations the distinction between imaginal exposure and real exposure is not properly made. I conclude that in order to account for all these cases a detailed theory is still to be given. To this end, I will revisit the role experiential imaginings play in our cognitive lives and propose a mechanism—the Prima Facie system—for accommodating such findings.