Abstract

Imagination is defined by the cognitive literature as a recreative faculty. The widespread view is that imagination recreates, i.e. simulates, other types of mental states. To be more precise, each type of the imaginative kind is expected to have a type of the non-imaginative kind as its counterpart. The debate has focused on two types of imagination: sensory and cognitive imagination. Sensory imagination has perception as its counterpart, i.e. it produces percept-like imaginings; whereas belief is the counterpart of cognitive imagination, which produces belief-like imaginings. I claim that there are at least four dimensions along which imaginings and counterparts can be compared: the content, the will, the truth and the limits. Hence, I will begin by analysing the relationship between sensory and cognitive imagination and their counterparts along these dimensions, and I will look more closely at what it is that makes a mental state an imaginative one. My goal is to outline a framework that shows in what respect an imagining might be similar and different from its counterpart. This framework could shed light on the imaginative domain, and paves the way to explore the domain of the non-imaginative mental states, in looking for other possible counterparts of the imaginative states.