Introduction 1.1. Imagination and Modality 1.2. Imaginative Resistance 3.1. Early Emergence of the Imagination 3.3. Imagination and Belief Generate Different Action Tendencies 3.4. Intentions Direct the Imagination 3.6. the Imagination Activates Affective Systems

Thought experiments, modal judgment, counterfactual reasoning. All of these activities, so central to philosophical inquiry, involve the ‘propositional imagination’, the capacity we exploit when we imagine that there is an evil genius, that everyone is color-blind, or that Holmes had a bad habit. Philosophy would be unrecognizable if we extracted all the parts that depend on the imagination. So too, everyday life would be unrecognizable if we excised imaginative activities. The imagination undoubtedly played an essential role in the growth of civilization, since the imagination is involved in hypothetical reasoning and planning. It’s likely that small-group social life depends heavily on the imagination as well. For our capacity to understand others relies on our ability to deploy the propositional imagination. Indeed, the propositional imagination is implicated in such a vast and fundamental set of practical and philosophical endeavors that it’s a wonder that the topic lay dormant for most of the twentieth century. Before the 1980s, there seems to have been no systematic tradition of work on cognitive accounts of the propositional imagination. Over the last two decades, there has finally been a concerted research effort to develop a cognitive account of the propositional imagination (e.g. Carruthers 2002; Currie 1995, 1998; Currie and Ravenscroft 2002; Goldman 1989, 1992; Gordon and Barker 1994; Harris 2000; Harris and Kavanaugh 1993; Jarrold et al. 1994; Leslie 1987, 1994; Lillard 1994; Nichols 2004a, forthcoming; Nichols and Stich 2000; Perner 1991; Perner et al. 1994).1 This volume capitalizes on this new work, by extending the theoretical picture of the propositional imagination and exploring the implications of cognitive accounts of the imagination. The volume also investigates broader philosophical issues surrounding the propositional imagination. In this Introduction, I will provide a general overview