Much recent work in philosophy of memory discusses the question whether episodic remembering is continuous with imagining. This paper contributes to the debate between continuists and discontinuists by considering a previously neglected source of evidence for continuism: the linguistic properties of overt memory and imagination reports (e.g. sentences of the form 'x remembers/imagines p'). I argue that the distribution and truth-conditional contribution of episodic uses of the English verb 'remember' is surprisingly similar to that of the verb 'imagine' – even (...) when compared to the distribution of other experiential attitude verbs like 'see', 'hallucinate', or 'dream'. This holds despite the presence of some remarkable truth-conditional differences between 'remember' and 'imagine'. I show how these differences can be explained by a continuist account of remembering on which remembering is past-directed, referential, and accurate experiential imagining. (shrink)

Ad hoc concepts feature prominently in lexical pragmatics. A speaker can use a word or phrase to communicate an ad hoc concept that is different from the lexically encoded concept and the hearer can construct the intended ad hoc concept pragmatically during utterance comprehension. I argue that some philosophical concepts have origins as ad hoc concepts, and such concepts pose a challenge for experimental philosophy regarding these concepts. To illustrate this, I consider philosophers’ ‘what-it’s-like’-concepts and experimental philosophy of consciousness.

Imagining being someone else from the inside is something relatively easy to do. In Williams (Imagination and the self, problems of the self: philosophical papers, p 26–45, 1973), for instance, one finds Williams’s famous imaginative scenario consisting in imagining being Napoleon from the inside at the battle of Austerlitz. However, providing an adequate analysis for imagination reports like “(1) Williams imagines being Napoleon (from the inside)” is no easy task, because the logical form of such imagination report is controversial. Following (...) Vendler (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 84(2):161–173, 1979), the logical form of statements “X imagines F-ing” typically involve a _PRO_ construction. Furthermore, it is generally acknowledged following Chierchia (Semant Contextual Exp 11:1–31, 1989) that _PRO_ constructions require a _de se_ reading. Consequently, (1) is argued to be an instance of _de se_ imagination (this is the “genuine _de se_” analysis of (1)). Yet, (1) is also crucially about Napoleon and, as forcefully argued for in Williams (Imagination and the self, problems of the self: philosophical papers, p 26–45, 1973), it is not even clear that it is about Williams. So (1) cannot be an instance of _de se_ imagination in the standard sense, because Williams does not self-ascribe the semantic content of the imagining episode (this is the “quasi-_de se_” analysis of (1)). In this paper, I vindicate the genuine _de se_ analysis, based on some new data involving nested imaginings. I then investigate some consequences of the view, which, I argue, are not available to the quasi-_de se_ theorists, including what the view says about failed imaginings. (shrink)

I argue that sich vorstellen (‘imagine’) in German, similar to English imagine, has a use as a fiction verb and a use as a verb of thinking. I follow Vendler (Rev Métaphys Morale 84(2):161–173, 1979) in assuming that the fiction verbs like vorstellen can be used to report acts of subjective imagination (imagined inner experiences) and acts of objective imagination (imagined outer experiences). For sich vorstellen as a verb of thinking we have to distinguish between a use on which it (...) introduces an activity and takes interrogative complements and DPs on a concealed question interpretation as arguments and a use on which it introduces an attitudinal state that can be characterized as betting on the truth of a proposition in a given subject matter. Given the differences in grammar and interpretation I argue that we have to distinguish four lexical entries for German sich vorstellen: imagine$$_{{\textsc {exp}}-{\textsc {sbj}}}$$ E X P - S B J, imagine$$_{{\textsc {exp}}{-}{\textsc {obj}}}$$ E X P - O B J, imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-act}}$$ P R O P - A C T, imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-state}}$$ P R O P - S T A T E. Having laid out all the necessary distinctions to account for the data, I discuss the prospects of reducing the number of lexical entries. I propose that imagine$$_{{\textsc {exp}}-{\textsc {sbj}}}$$ E X P - S B J and imagine$$_{{\textsc {exp}}{-}{\textsc {obj}}}$$ E X P - O B J could be reduced to imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-act}}$$ P R O P - A C T if we assume that all reports of experiential imagining can be reduced to reports of propositional imagining that combine the predicate imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-act}}$$ P R O P - A C T with a question of the kind ‘what would it be like?’, following an idea in D’Ambrosio and Stoljar (Synthese 199:12923–12944, 2021). Under this assumption only two lexical entries are needed: an entry for imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-act}}$$ P R O P - A C T, a rogative predicate that introduces activities, and imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-state}}$$ P R O P - S T A T E an attitude predicate that takes propositions as arguments and introduces an attitudinal state. The overall result is that the grammar and interpretation of the fiction verb sich vorstellen is much closer to verbs of thinking than one might imagine. (shrink)