What Is Sensory Imagining?

Robert Hopkins (New York University)

What is it to visualize a castle or the Big Bang, to imagine the smell of chocolate, or to compose a tune in one's head? The answer I offer has three parts. First, sensory imagining exhibits various surface phenomena that distinguish it from sensing. Second, the states that exhibit those features are both manifestly representational and expressions of our agency. But third, the representing in question has a particular structure; a structure analogous to that found in perception, but filled out here in very different ways. The structure as found in perception has been described by various philosophers, from Husserl to Alva Nöe. Its application to imagining is new.

There will be a reception after the lecture.