Imagination

What do we philosophize about imagination for?

1) Berkeley: to show that idealism is true

2) Martin: to show that disjunctivism is true

3) Peacocke: ? [to show that Berkeley is right]

4) (me?) to investigate whether and how imagination is a guide to (some kind of) possibility

(Peacocke too: to rebut argument about our knowledge of other minds and the possibility of inverted qualia).

Or, we could come at imagination directly from the following puzzles:

The form of "imagines" statements: Compare

(1) Joe imagines flying above San Francisco.

(2) Joe imagines a brown banana.

(3) Imagine flying above San Francisco!

(4) Imagine a brown banana.

(Compare: "Joe wants...")

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Berkeley, Martin, Peacocke

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Hypothesis: To imagine is to imagine perceiving.

*****My view?****

Hypothesis: the content of (visual) imagining is the content of experience, in a hypothetical mode.

A worry: imagination is too subjective to serve as a guide for possibility; it leads us to psychologism and solipsism.

Reply: maybe yes, maybe no. We need an account of the objectivity of the content of imaginings. Indicative conditionals shall be our guide!

A tour of the philosophy of indicative conditionals.

"One standard way of approaching the problem....begins with the assumption that a sentence of this kind expresses a proposition that is a function of the propositions expressed by its component parts...[a conditional assertion is a standard kind of speech act with a distinctive kind of content--a conditional proposition.] But there is also a long tradition according to which conditional sentences..are used to perform a special kind of speech act." (Stalnaker 1)

*the content/force distinction--used, for example, in philosophy of memory. (Call the distinctive force "conjecture," perhaps,)

*a feature shared by both camps: the creation of a ``derived context" by the antecedent.

*Do indicative conditionals have highly context-sensitive truth-conditions (Stalnaker), or no truth-conditions at all?

"What must be granted is that in some cases, indicative conditionals are implicitly about the speaker's beliefs. We must allow that what I say when I say something of the form 'if A, then B'may not be the same as what you would have said, uttering the same words." (Stalnaker, 12, emphasis added)

What pushes Stalnaker to this conclusion? Consider cases like the infamous case of Sly Pete!

[...]

Another case: The miners!

Lesson: we must restrict reasoning in the scope of an assumption. Two ways to do this: limit the application of certain rules in the scope of an assumption (Byrne, MacF and K), or forbid discharging of an assumption (Heck?), or create more cases (me?)...