Phil Joyce

The thesis responds to Wittgenstein’s diary argument, in the light of Kripke's metaphysical meaning scepticism, by exploring the conditions for meaningful thought and talk about our sensations. Its strategy is to develop Wittgenstein’s suggestion that rule following is grounded in practice, by considering the practical knowledge required by a rule follower to maximise her desirable sensations. The thesis contradicts Kripke's conclusion in two respects: first, it argues that rule following with respect to our sensations is not an essentially social phenomenon; secondly, it argues that there are meaning constituting facts underwriting such solitary rule following. In particular, a solitary rule follower can meaningfully think and talk about the recurrence of particular sensations in virtue of a faculty of imagination. The faculty has unintentional and intentional aspects. It is unintentionally active in conscious experience of sensation, and is thereby responsible for what Kant calls the ‘spontaneity’ of experience. It can be intentionally active, as when, for example, a practitioner attempting to maximise desirable sensation deliberates practically about possible outcomes. Such a practitioner successfully follows rules with respect to her thought and talk about her sensations when she imagines them correctly. Correct, intentional imagination of a sensation is explicated in terms of ontologically inter dependent, practical and theoretical modes of presentation of the sensation. The faculty of imagination supports two complementary kinds of practical deliberation, that together provide what Williams calls a ‘continuum from rational thought to inspiration and conversion’.

According to Mellor, we know what an experience is like if we can imagine it correctly, and we will do so if we recognise the experience as it is imagined. This paper identifies a constraint on adequate accounts of how we ordinarily imagine experiences correctly: the capacities to imagine and to recognise the experience must be jointly operative at the point of forming an intention to imagine the experience. The paper develops an account of imagining experiences correctly that meets this constraint in terms of the subject's possession of a concept of the experience. The account implies that the imagination is active in conscious perception.