Many theorists have pointed out that imagination, or at least a salient type of imagination, is bound to the “experienceable”.[1] In this sense, we can imagine only what can be experienced. For instance, we can visually imagine only what can be seen and auditorily imagine only what can be heard. To capture the latter examples, philosophers often talk of vision-like and audition-like imagination. More generally, the relevant type of imagination is experience-like or (as we shall also say) experiential, whether or not one believes that experiential imagination exhausts the field of possible imaginings.
However, the precise sense in which imagination is experiential remains a deep and complicated issue. In this essay, we would like to inquire into the scope of experiential imagination. In particular, we want to relate the notion of experiential imagination to two important distinctions present in the contemporary literature on imagination, namely the distinction between sensory and cognitive imagination (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; McGinn 2004) and the distinction between subjective and objective imagination (Vendler 1984; Dokic 2008). We aim at proposing, eventually, a systematic and hopefully enlightening taxonomy of the varieties of experiential imagination.
The essay is structured as follows: Section 2 tackles the broad phenomenological sense in which our imaginings are experiential. Sensory imagination will emerge as an important sub-type of experiential imagination.
Section 3 individuates two more fundamental sub-species of experiential imagination, namely objective and subjective imagination. We shall point out that this distinction maps onto an independently motivated distinction in the field of non-imaginative mental states, namely that between external and internal experiences. While external experiences (such as vision) are only accidentally de se, internal experiences (such as proprioception or agentive experience) are essentially or at least normally de se. The upshot will be that sensory imagination is best seen as a paradigmatic case of objective imagination.
Section 4 discusses the distinction between objective and subjective imagination, as Zeno Vendler introduces it on the basis of intuitive contrast examples. We shall show that Vendler’s distinction diverges from ours, since it seems to hinge on a distinction between two ways the self can be involved in our imaginings. We shall suggest that the latter distinction is in fact orthogonal to our distinction between objective and subjective imagination (section 4.1). Moreover, upon closer look, the contrast examples offered by Vendler motivate our construction of the objective versus subjective distinction, which will prove to be more fruitful for the theory of imagination (section 4.2).
Section 5 presents the notion of cognitive or belief-like imagination and gives some reason to resist its interpretation as a form of non-experiential imagination. Cognitive imagination can be construed as experiential, provided that at least some of our occurrent beliefs are conscious. Moreover, if belief is an experience, it is clearly an external experience. Therefore, cognitive imagination will emerge as a sub-species of objective imagination, along with sensory imagination.
Section 6 further investigates the domain of subjective imagination and its heterogeneity. We shall suggest that, along with proprioception, agentive experience, introspection, and feeling pain, subjective imagination may re-create other internal ways of gaining information about one’s mental states, including beliefs.
Although much of our discussion in this essay belongs to conceptual clarification informed by phenomenological considerations, section 7 briefly describes several upshots of our account with respect to modal epistemology, cognitive resonance phenomena, mindreading, and imaginative identification. It is our contention that the relevance of the conceptual distinctions proposed by our taxonomy of experiential imagination has been crucially neglected in many important philosophical and scientific applications of the notion of imagination.