LanCog Workshop on Fiction and Imagination
Kathleen Stock (Sussex)
How belief-like is imagining?
It is commonly claimed in the philosophy of imagination that imagining is significantly belief-like. I will examine the ways in which this is supposedly so. I will then identify two prima facie different forms of imagining, and argue that only one of them exhibits any of the posited belief-like features. Finally I will suggest that what seemed prima facie to be different sorts of imaginings were not, really, and that what looked like a kind of imagining which was essentially belief-like was in fact some imagining which, in a certain contingent context but not essentially, exhibited significantly belief-like features. Hence it will be shown that the ways in which imagining is significantly belief-like are much more limited than was initially claimed.