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Imagining one experience to be another
Bence Nanay1,2
1Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp, D 413, Grote Kauwenberg 18, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium.
Abstract:
I can imagine a banana to be a phone receiver. I can also imagine the flapping of my arms to be flying. So it is possible to imagine one thing to be another-at least for some types of 'things'. I will argue that although it is possible to imagine an object to be another object and it is also possible to imagine an activity to be a different activity, one cannot imagine one's present sensory experience to be a different sensory experience with different qualitative character. This claim will have some important consequences beyond the philosophy of imagination, for example, for some accounts of depiction.
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