ABSTRACT
One group of concepts that it is difficult to obtain a reflective understanding of is a set of concepts concerned with activities of the imagination. These concepts have two essential features: they pertain to the imagination and they have an ostensible counterpart that involves either the exercise of one of the senses or the performance of a bodily action. On the one hand, there is the concept of visualising, or seeing in the mind’s eye, and the allied concepts of imagining in perceptual modes other than sight (hearing in one’s imagination, for example); on the other hand, there is the concept of internal speech, or speaking in one’s imagination, the concept of calculation in the head and the allied concepts of performances in the imagination of activities that, when not performed in the imagination, involve external behaviour. The root of the problem raised by these concepts of the imagination is the nature of their relationships with their apparent counterparts. Each of these concepts seems to be the analogue in the realm of the imagination of a concept that runs parallel to it in the non-imaginative world. The problem is to elucidate the connection between the two concepts.
