Explaining imagination

"Imagination will remain a mystery-we will not be able to explain imagination-until we can break it into simpler parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the simpler parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process-one with its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states--judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, philosophy of language, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach."--Dust jacket cover.

Explaining Imagination -- Folk Psychology and Its Ontology -- Imagistic Imagining Part I: Imagery, Attitude Imagining, and Recreative Imagining -- Imagistic Imagining Part II: Hybrid Structure, Multiple Attitudes, and Daydreams -- Conditional Reasoning Part I: Three Kinds of Conditionals and the Psychology of the Material Conditional -- Conditional Reasoning Part II: Indicatives, Subjunctives, and the Ramsey Test -- Pretense Part I: Metaphysics and Epistemology -- Pretense Part II: Psychology -- Consuming Fictions Part I: Recovering Fictional Truths -- Consuming Fictions Part II: The Operator Claim -- Consuming Fictions Part III: Immersion, Emotion, and the Paradox of Fiction -- Creativity.