imagination the mental faculty sometimes thought to encompass all acts of thinking about something novel, contrary to fact, or not currently perceived; thus: ‘Imagine that Lincoln had not been assassinated,’ or ‘Use your imagination to create a new design for roller skates.’ ‘Imagination’ also denotes an important perception-like aspect of some such thoughts, so that to imagine something is to bring to mind what it would be like to perceive it. Philosophical theories of imagination must explain its apparent intentionality: when we imagine, we always imagine something. Imagination is always directed toward an object, even though the object may not exist. Moreover, imagination, like perception, is often seen as involving qualia, or special subjective properties that are sometimes thought to discredit materialist, especially functionalist, theories of mind. The intentionality of imagination and its perceptual character lead some theories to equate imagination with ‘imaging’: being conscious of or perceiving a mental image. However, because the ontological status of such images and the nature of their properties are obscure, many philosophers have rejected mental images in favor of an adverbial theory on which to imagine something red is best analyzed as imagining ‘redly.’ Such theories avoid the difficulties associated with mental images, but must offer some other way to account for the apparent intentionality of imagination as well as its perceptual character. Imagination, in the hands of Husserl and Sartre, becomes a particularly apt subject for phenomenology. It is also cited as a faculty that separates human thought from any form of artificial intelligence. Finally, imagination often figures prominently in debates about possibility, in that what is imaginable is often taken to be coextensive with what is possible.
See also CONCEIVABILITY , IDEA, INTEN- TIONALITY , PERCEPTION , PHILOSOPHY OF MIN. L.-M.R.