Jo Ahlberg (Hertfordshire) The Propositional Aspect of Sensory Imagination

The central claim in this paper is that visual mental images are propositionally contentful. By getting a handle on the metaphysics of propositionalism, and separating propositionality from representation, I demonstrate that propositions are versatile enough to use a variety of representational forms. An important upshot of my thesis is that if visual mental images have propositional content, then the idea that so-called sensory imagination – imagination which features the attitude of imagination with a visual mental image as its content – is a purely phenomenal mental state without propositional content, is false. The sensory/propositional imagination distinction is thus undermined.