ABSTRACT
The uses, and applications, of the terms ‘image’, ‘imagine’, ‘imagination’, ‘imaginative’, and so forth make up a very diverse and scattered family. Even this image of a family seems too definite. It would be a matter of more than difficulty exactly to identify and list the family’s members, let alone establish their relationships of parenthood and cousinhood. But we can at least point to different areas of association in each of which some members of this group of terms ordinarily find employment. Here are three such areas: (1) the area in which imagination is linked with image and image is understood as mental image – a picture in the mind’s eye or (perhaps) a tune running through one’s head; (2) the area in which imagination is associated with invention, and also (sometimes) with originality or insight or felicitous or revealing or striking departure from routine; (3) the area in which imagination is linked
with false belief, delusion, mistaken memory, or misperception. My primary concern here is not with any of these three areas of association, though I shall refer to them all, and especially to the first. My primary topic is Kant’s use of the term ‘imagination’, in the Critique of Pure Reason, in connection with perceptual recognition – a use which may appear something of an outsider, but nevertheless has claims to affinity which are worth considering. I shall refer also to Hume and to Wittgenstein. My paper in general belongs to the species loosely ruminative and comparative-historical rather than to the species strictly argumentative or systematic-analytical.
