Explaining Supposition and Imagination: Are They Just a Collection of Beliefs, Desires and Other Folk Mental States?

Margot Strohminger (Australian Catholic University)

“Explaining Supposition and Imagination: Are They Just a Collection of Beliefs, Desires and Other Folk Mental States?”

It is widely assumed that imagination is a basic propositional attitude, which cannot be reduced to other parts of our folk psychology. In this respect it is more like belief and desire than, say, suspicion or wishing. This widespread assumption has come under recent attack in work by Peter Langland-Hassan, especially his Explaining Imagination (2020). In this talk, I’ll develop a challenge for Langland-Hassan’s reductionist approach, which focuses on the case of supposition. Supposition is often treated as a kind of imagination yet, I’ll argue, we are unable to reductively explain it in terms of folk mental states apart from imagination. In closing, I consider how we ought to think of supposition instead.

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