Let us start with Christopher Peacocke’s analysis of imagination, which can help us to delineate what we mean by “experiential imagination.” Peacocke (1985) puts forward what he calls the “General Hypothesis” about imagination, or GH (General Hypothesis) for short:
GH =Df To imagine something is always at least to imagine, from the inside, being in some conscious state (Peacocke 1985, p. 21).
Peacocke does not offer an explicit definition of the phrase “from the inside”, but we shall follow Kendall Walton’s interpretation and assume that “the question of whether an imagining is from the inside arises only when what is imagined is an experience (broadly construed)” (Walton 1990, p. 31). For instance, I may imagine being a descendant of Napoleon, but, according to Walton, my imagining does not essentially involve the perspective of any experience properly speaking. There is nothing it is like to be a descendant of Napoleon.[2] So there is no question of imagining “from the inside” having this relational property. In contrast, when I visually imagine a white sandy beach, my imagining involves an experiential perspective. I imagine “from the inside” a specific visual experience.
Peacocke’s notion of imagining from the inside is broadly related to other notions in the philosophical literature on imagination. For instance, Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft introduce the notion of recreative imagination as the capacity to have “states that are not perceptions or beliefs or decisions or experiences of movements of one’s body, but which are in various ways like those states—like them in ways that enable the states possessed through imagination to mimic and, relative to certain purposes, to substitute for perceptions, beliefs, decisions, and experiences of movements” (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 12). Similarly, Alvin Goldman puts forward the notion of enactment imagination (or E-imagination) as “a matter of creating or trying to create in one’s own mind a selected mental state, or at least a rough facsimile of such a state, through the faculty of the imagination” (Goldman 2006, p. 42).[3]
Many other philosophers have held the view that imagination is the capacity to “modify” non-imaginative kinds of mental state (Husserl 1901; Meinong 1902; Mulligan 1999; Weinberg & Meskin 2006a, 2006b), where the relevant modification is to be understood as the “preservation” of some features of the non-imaginative states, such as part of their functional roles, despite phenomenological discrepancies or different overall cognitive underpinnings. This view is independent of a strong kind of simulationism, according to which each of several types of imagination shares with a proper non-imaginative counterpart some cognitive mechanism (or set of information-processing systems), which is redeployed off-line.
To recapitulate, according to the terminology used in this essay, imagination is the general capacity to produce sui generis occurrent mental states, which we call “imaginings”. Whenever a subject imagines something, she is in a particular mental state of imagining. What type of mental state the subject is in depends on the non-imaginative conscious state that is re-created. Here we want to remain as neutral as possible with respect to the relationship between imaginings and their analogues in the non-imaginative mental realm. It is enough for our purposes to accept the idea that a phenomenologically useful taxonomy of imagination can be guided by a corresponding taxonomy of non-imaginative mental states (and perhaps also the other way around, as we shall suggest toward the end of the essay).
From now on, instead of using Peacocke’s phrase “imagining from the inside”, which is potentially misleading (see footnote 16 below), we are going to use phrases of the form “X-like imagination”, or “re-creating X” in imagination, where X is a type of non-imaginative state (as in “vision-like imagination”, or “re-creating a proprioceptive experience”). However, our use of these phrases should not be interpreted as carrying all the commitments of simulationist or recreative theories of imagination (whence the presence of the hyphen in “re-creating”).
GH turns out to be a general definition of imagination as essentially involving the perspective of a conscious experience—precisely what we call “experiential imagination”. Peacocke then introduces a more specific hypothesis precisely in order to identify sensory imagination as a sub-domain of experiential imagination.[4] He himself calls this hypothesis the “Experiential Hypothesis”, but in order to avoid confusion and make it clear that only sensory imagination is at stake, we are going to call it the “Sensory Hypothesis” (or Sensory Hypothesis (SensH) for short), and rephrase it as follows:
SensH =Df To imagine something sensorily is always at least to re-create some sensory experience.
For instance, imagining being in front of the Panthéon or at the helm of a yacht (Peacocke’s examples) may involve re-creating some visual experience as of being in front of the Panthéon or at the helm of the yacht.
Sensory imagination is not confined to vision. In Peacocke’s words, SensH deals with “imaginings describable pre-theoretically as visualizations, hearings in one’s head, or their analogues in other modalities” (Peacocke 1985, p. 22).[5] A similar definition of sensory imagination can be found in the work of other philosophers (Kind 2001; Noordhof 2002; McGinn 2004). The same type of imagination has also been labeled “perception-like” (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002), “perceptual imagination” (Chalmers 2002), and even “experiential imagination” (Carruthers 2002).
To the extent that SensH is concerned only with cases in which the subject re-creates a specific type of experience, namely sensory experience, it deals with a sub-type of experiential imagination as covered by GH, namely sensory imagination. At this point, the question arises as to what other types of experiential imagination there are beyond the sensory type. Walton suggests that the notion of experience at stake in GH should be interpreted in a broad way, and we may wonder about its precise breadth.