Reference in Imagination without Intentions to Imagine

Margot Strohminger (Australian Catholic University)

Join Zoom meeting:

https://monash.zoom.us/j/86351045263?pwd=1gHMLhmDnXiFJIV0Jl8s6GxhgBgylb.1 

Meeting ID: 863 5104 5263 // Passcode: 184791

Reference in Imagination without Intentions to Imagine (Joint work with Daniel Munro)  

Abstract: How do imaginings come to refer to their objects? One popular view (“intentionalism”) assigns a central role to imaginative intentions. According to this view, intentions about what to imagine are sufficient for fixing the referent of one’s resulting imagining. Previous criticisms of intentionalism have pointed to apparent counterexamples in which imaginers intuitively fail to imagine what they intend; however, these criticisms are arguably inconclusive. We provide further reasons for rejecting intentionalism by presenting cases in which subjects succeed in imagining what they intend, but in which their intentions are still not the factor that determines what they imagine. Instead, their imaginings inherit their contents from prior imaginings or episodic memories. We use the range of counterexamples to intentionalism to motivate an alternative causal explanation, according to which causal connections to objects often explain imaginative reference to those objects. We conclude by exploring how our cases support continuities between the imagination and episodic memory.