ABSTRACT
It seems fairly uncontroversial to say that there are certain activities that we can jointly perform, such as walking and perceiving, and certain states that we can share, such as the emotional state of together enjoying that walk or that perception. How exactly these ‘we phenomena’ are best described is the topic of much current philosophical debate. However, most of the debate on collective intentionality focuses on experiences that are constitutively related to public objects, events or environments. However, what if the objects and experiences concerned are not, or at least, not in any obvious way, public? Is there such a thing as shared imagining? There is at least one fairly unproblematic way to understand this question, namely as a question concerning the social embeddedness of imagining. This way is fairly unproblematic because the idea of a ‘social imaginary,’ i.e., the idea that what each individual imagines is embedded in social and cultural conditions, is now widely accepted. In this lecture, I test the far more radical idea that imagining not only is socially embedded, but may be genuinely ‘shared,’ i.e., distributed across a group. This idea is radical because it appears to stand in direct conflict with common assumptions about imagining: that, unlike perceiving, imagining happens ‘in private’ (in one’s own head, in front of the mind’s eye, etc.) and in reference to ‘private‘ objects (one’s personal fictions and phantasies). In order to sharpen the distinctive profile of this idea, in order to assess its accuracy, and in order to draw out wider implications for our understanding both of imagination and of mind or consciousness in general, I discuss concrete examples from dance, game playing, musical improvisation, and philosophical teamwork.
