This volume brings together specially written essays by leading researchers on the propositional imagination. This is the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that Holmes has a bad habit or that there are zombies. It plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and indeed in everyday life. The Architecture of the Imagination capitalizes on recent attempts to give a cognitive account of this capacity, extending the theoretical picture and exploring the philosophical implications.

Shaun Nichols is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Sentimental Rules (OUP, 2004), and co-author, with Stephen Stich, of Mindreading (OUP, 2003).

• 1: Shaun Nichols: Introduction


• The nature of the imagination


• 2: Tim Schroeder and Carl Matheson: . Imagination and Emotion


• 3: Alvin Goldman: Imagination and Simulation in Audience Responses to Fiction


• 4: Adam Morton: . Imagination and Misimagination


• 5: Deena Skolnick and Paul Bloom: The Intuitive Cosmology of Fictional Worlds


• Pretence


• 6: Peter Carruthers: Why Pretend?


• 7: Gregory Currie: Why Irony is Pretence


• Imaginative resistance


• 8: Kendall Walton: . On the (So-Called) Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance


• 9: Tamar Szabó Gendler: Imaginative Resistance Revisited


• 10: Jonathan Weinberg and Aaron Meskin: Puzzling Over the Imagination: Philosophical Problems, Architectural Solutions


• Imagination and possibility


• 11: Christopher Hill: Modality, Modal Epistemology, and the Metaphysics of Consciousness


• 12: Shaun Nichols: Imaginative Blocks and Impossibility: An Essay in Modal Psychology


• 13: Roy Sorensen: Meta-conceivability and Thought Experiments