Overly enactive imagination? Imagining the unimaginable?

Prof Dan Hutto (University of Wollongong)

Is  contentless imagining imaginable? Some think not: Others think not, necessarily. A certain philosophical frame of mind holds that contentless imaginings are not just difficult or hard to imagine – they are plainly unimaginable, “inconceivable” (Shapiro 2014a, p. 214): it is simply not possible to imagine acts of imagining in the absence of content. This conclusion is sometimes presented as if it were analytic: guaranteed by few self-evident truths about cognition: (1) All cognition involves content, necessarily; (2) All imaginings are forms of cognition; thus (3) All imaginings involve content. If (1) is a sufficiently strong conceptual truth about cognition then this would explain why, in virtue of their cognitive status, it is simply inconceivable that imaginings might lack content.  If (1) holds it is simply incoherent to think otherwise and any attempted suggestion to the contrary is not just false, it is utter nonsense: an ill-formed attempt to deny “the undeniable” (Shapiro 2014a, p. 214). Using the imagination as a critical test case of the tenability of a radically non-representational enactivism, this presentation will show that the assumption that imagination is contentful is neither needed nor attractive when it comes to answering substantial  explanatory questions about how imaginings perform their most fundamental roles in our cognitive lives.