One central aspect of the taxonomy that Dokic & Arcangeli propose is the distinction between subjective imagination and objective imagination (see this collection, pp. 4). Subjective imagination re-creates internal experiences: experiences that are “supposed to be about a mental or bodily state of oneself” (Dokic & Arcangeli this collection, p. 6). As an example, the authors point to “proprioceptive and agentive experiences” (Dokic & Arcangeli this collection, p. 6) such as imagining the movements of swimming in the sea. In contrast, objective imagination re-creates external experiences. These are experiences that are “typically about the external world” (Dokic & Arcangeli this collection, p. 6)—such as, for example, visual experiences of objects. Dokic & Arcangeli claim that experiential imaginings in general can be divided into subjective and objective imaginings (this collection, p. 6). In a second step, this differentiation is then distinguished from Zeno Vendler’s distinction between imaginings that either implicitly or explicitly involve the self (Dokic & Arcangeli this collection, pp. 7). The authors argue that Vendler’s categorisation differs from their own by providing four examples of cases of subjective and objective imagination that involve the self either implicitly or explicitly (Dokic & Arcangeli this collection, p. 8).
I have a number of worries about some of the ideas and notions that the authors put forward along this line of thought. My first worry concerns the claim that the suggested differentiation of objective and subjective imagination concerns the mode of the respective state and therefore differs from Vendler’s distinction, which is thought to be about the state’s content (Dokic & Arcangeli this collection, p. 8). Internal and external experiences are equally internal in some sense, since they are experiences that are internal to some subject. As I understand the authors here, the difference between internal and external experiences is that they are usually about internal or external entities, respectively. Thus, in the given context, the notions internal and external apparently specify what the experiences are about. On the level of imagination, subjective and objective imagination re-creates these different types of experiences. The authors specify this idea by spelling out two versions of the General Hypothesis adapted for objective and subjective imagination, called ObjH and SubjH (Dokic & Arcangeli this collection, p. 6). As I specified above in section 2, one can read the General Hypothesis and its variants as claiming that imaginings re-create experiences in the sense that they represent experiences as part of their contents. If one accepts this interpretation, it is not obvious to me why and how re-creating internal and external experiences in the imagination yields imaginings that are different in mode (namely subjective and objective imaginings) and not in terms of what they represent. This point is an exemplification of the issue I raised in section 2: it depends on how one spells out the notion of re-creation whether or not the line of argument that the authors present to distinguish their notions from Vendler’s is convincing.
My second worry concerns the notion of implicitly involving the self. It seems to me that there is room to argue that both objective and subjective imagination as defined by Dokic and Arcangeli always involve the self implicitly (the authors briefly address this point in footnote 13). If this were the case it is unclear how their notions are different from Vendler’s. The self is implicitly involved in an imagining if “it fixes the point of view internal to the imagined scene without being a constituent of that scene” (Dokic & Arcangeli this collection, p. 7). An example is imagining seeing the Pantheon: there is a specific point of view involved in this imagining (Dokic & Arcangeli this collection, p. 7). This, however, seems to be the definition of Experiential Imagination in general that the authors propose in the beginning of the paper. They explain (by referring to Peacocke) that Experiential Imagination always involves an experiential perspective (Dokic & Arcangeli this collection, p. 3). If involving an experiential perspective is sufficient to implicitly involve the self, and if experiential imaginings are defined as imaginings that involve an experiential perspective, then every experiential imagining involves the self implicitly. If this is indeed how the authors conceive of Experiential Imagination, a notion introduced by Michael Martin may be helpful for dismissing certain difficulties (though I am aware that he uses this notion in a context with different argumentative aims). Martin argues (similarly to Peacocke) that at least some sensory imaginings involve a point of view, and thereby implicitly represent experiences (2002, pp. 40). However, as he explains, the presence of a point of view in the imagining does not imply that I myself occupy this point of view: “[t]he point of view within the imagined scene is notoriously empty enough that one can in occupying that point of view imagine being someone other that one actually is” (Martin 2002, p. 411). I take this to be a promising way of differentiating imaginings from non-imaginative experiences, since they involve different kinds of points of view or perspectivalness (I will say more on this in section 5).
Maybe this notion of an empty point of view can also be helpful for further sharpening the notions of objective and subjective imagination. One could argue that objective experiential imaginings involve a point of view—but an empty one. Thus, imagining seeing the Pantheon involves a point of view, but this point of view is empty in the sense that it must not be myself occupying this point of view. In this sense, objective imaginings may not involve the self at all. This observation could also serve to set the subjective/objective distinction apart from Vendler’s. But it is probably more difficult to transfer the notion of an empty point of view to subjective imagination, given that it is defined as re-creating experiences about oneself. Maybe this is close to what the authors have in mind when they loosen the notion of subjective imagination towards the end of the paper by claiming that subjective imaginings may be neutral about the identity of the self involved (Dokic & Arcangeli this collection, p. 16). Thus, to conclude, considering the notion of an empty point of view at least seems to be an interesting option to be explored in order to strengthen the objective/subjective distinction and the notion of subjective imagination. Apart from this suggestion, I will come back to the notion of an empty point of view in the final section of this commentary and on this basis offer an additional perspective.