Explaining Imagination

Abstract The project of explaining imagination is introduced and motivated. A distinction is drawn between two kinds of imagining: attitude imagining (A-imagining) and imagistic imagining (I-imagining). While both receive extended treatment in the book, the core project will be to explain A-imagining in more basic folk psychological terms. A-imagining, it will be argued, is simply the use of more basic folk psychological states such as beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. Some of these states have mental images as constituents and so qualify also as I-imaginings as well. The chapter’s second half explains why the most common arguments for imagination’s irreducibility to other folk psychological states are either question-begging or inconclusive. The chapter concludes by previewing a number of the reductive strategies for explaining imagination that later chapters develop in detail. In this way, the first chapter serves as a précis for the book as a whole.