Abstract

What is sensory imagining and what role does it play in our lives? How does visualizing a castle, running through a tune in one's head, or imagining the taste of fish ice cream relate to perceiving such things, or to remembering them? What are the connections between imagining and agency, and how does it relate to emotion and other affect? The Profile of Imagining offers a theory that answers these and many other questions. It argues that sensory imagining involves the redeployment of resources central to perception, though in a radically different context and to very different effect. The result is a view that explains central features of imagining's phenomenology and functional role, including its capacity to capture what it would be like to perceive its objects, while acknowledging the many and striking differences between imagining and sensing. Hopkins shows how the view can be extended to imagining in other forms, especially the imagining of affect; and uses it to argue for some surprising conclusions: that imagining something is not a way to engage with its aesthetic character; and that imagining provokes real feeling much less often than is usually assumed. Table of contents: Introduction; Ch.1 Imagining and agency; Ch.2 To be given as a representation; Ch.3 Knowledge of sensory profiles; Ch.4 Profiles in imagination; Ch.5 Observation, overflow and attention; Ch.6 Episodic memory; Ch.7 Learning from imagining; Ch.8 Aesthetic engagement, imagining and the draw of the real; Ch.9 Reacting to imagining?; Conclusion