Imaginative Content
Imaginative Content
Sensuous imaginative content presents a problem for unitary accounts of phenomenal character (or content) such as relationism, representationalism, or qualia theory. Four features of imaginative content are at the heart of the issue: its perspectival nature, the similarity with corresponding perceptual experiences, the multiple use thesis, and its non-presentational character. This chapter rejects appeals to the dependency thesis to account for these features and explains how a representationalist approach can be developed to accommodate them. The author defends the multiple use thesis against Kathleen Stock’s objections but separates the putative non-presentational character of imaginative content into two elements. Loss of presentation is accounted for by the reduced representations involved in imagination and lack of potential response-dependent representational properties. Absence of commitment to reality is accounted for by representational properties characterized in terms of the absence of a certain kind of aetiology.
Keywords: image content, supposition, relationism, representationalism, qualia, perspective, multiple use, dependency thesis, perception, memory
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