Sensory Imagining and Knowing

Robert Hopkins (New York University)

What form of access do we have to the contents of sensory imagining? I hold that every aspect of what we imagine we are aware of. (This is not to say we have the corresponding belief, or that we are necessarily aware of it as imagined.) Relatedly, I deny that it is possible to observe what we imagine. Both claims face serious challenges from a series of examples. I show how the cases and the claims can be reconciled, by drawing on the account of imagining's structure given in the first lecture. That account enables us to cede some ground to the cases: there can be aspects of the world as we've imagined it of which we are not aware. However, these are not part of the contents of imagining proper; and the process by which we become aware of them is more like inference than observation. The upshot is that our access to sensory imagining closely parallels that we have to the contents of our thoughts. What we think and what we imagine is open to us, as what we perceive is not.