Jay Richardson

The contribution of imagination to deliberation is underappreciated. Recent focus on this question has concerned only the motivational value of mental imagery–a kind of representational content. I go further in arguing that some instances of complex deliberation require distinctive kinds of imaginative attitudes. I argue that deliberation can involve imaginative desire, which is an imaginative recreation of desire, but free of the motivational value that genuine desires have. Because of this, imaginative desires are motivationally safe. Safety, in turn, marks an important continuity between deliberation, engagement with fiction, and empathy.

This article presents elements of a theory of the representational contents of episodic memory and a new perspective on the relationship between memory and self‐knowledge. These two interrelated outcomes fall out of a novel naturalistic treatment of the debate concerning the compatibility between semantic externalism and a priori self‐knowledge. In particular, the article offers a response to the memory argument, which leverages the slow switching thought experiment against semantic externalism. All parties in the debate have, so far, overlooked scientific insights into memory. This lacuna is remedied and an empirically informed defence of externalism is proposed.

This article presents elements of a theory of the representational contents of episodic memory and a new perspective on the relationship between memory and self-knowledge. These two interrelated outcomes fall out of a novel naturalistic treatment of the debate concerning the compatibility between semantic externalism and a priori self-knowledge. In particular, the article offers a response to the memory argument, which leverages the slow switching thought experiment against semantic externalism. All parties in the debate have, so far, overlooked scientific insights into memory. This lacuna is remedied and an empirically informed defence of externalism is proposed.